The Writing Front

I’ve got a working office down in the old basement of my mother’s house. Yes, chuckle now, it is all good since I have a refrigerator down here too. I printed off a copy of A Restoration of Faith on campus and tonight I was finally able to put a bit of time in on proofreading.

To be honest, I’m rusty. It is one thing to proofread and redact the work of others. Proofreading your own material is notoriously difficult and I am very much out of practice. Still, it was a good news/bad news day at the office.

The good news is that my narrative ability seems intact after so many years of abuse and neglect. My ability to lay out the structure of a story in the first draft is intact as well. I’ve also got a decent concept.

The bad news? I’m infodumping too much. Worse, I still write way too many scenes which later have to be boiled down and consolidated into a solid, meaty single scene. It was a problem with earlier efforts and it still seems to be a problem now.

I’m not sure what the solution is which would expedite matters.

I’ll put in more time on the project this week.

In the meantime, I sent Maternal Soldier out to a new market. We’ll see how that goes. Frankly, it is always good to get a story back out into the marketplace. You can’t get published if you don’t submit.

Other Fronts

My stomach and sinus issues make it impossible to sleep between the hours of 11 pm to 2 am. This leaves me tired, wore out and incredibly foul tempered. A solution needs to be found.

I figure a two to three hour nap in the afternoon and/or evening when my stomach is cooperative may be part of the answer. Augmented by four to six hours after 2 am, this might be viable. There is also the added benefit of three hours of silence at night. I’m up anyway so I may as well get some work done.

Finally, I plan on stomping the weeds down around here and getting this blog back into regular operation. We’ll see how that goes.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
Kansas City, Missouri

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