The Writing Front

Three pages longhand. That was my output for today. They’ll be transcribed later when I build up a large enough stockpile during some dark evening hour when I seem to do best with transcription work.

My plan of attack for the summer is pretty simple really. I’ll do the longhand work in the mornings on the front porch. The basement really isn’t going to work for this type of effort when I’ve got sun and warm weather. Granted, these will be mornings when I am not scheduled to be on first shift at the pool but then I never wrote every morning even during the Uniguard Era.

I spent part of that morning just trying to get the writing muscles limbered up again. It is one thing to punch in facebook updates and blog entries like this one. It is quite another to write fiction. They require different writing muscles and mine have, for lack of a better term, atrophied with disuse.

I have two story proposals on deck for June which I will get out the door. One of them, I think, can be consolidated into a 1000 word stand alone short story. The other, the one I have put more time into, will remain as an excerpt piece.

For July I may turn my attention in one of two directions. One is a possible tie in piece to another writer’s material, something which is a bit of an open secret to those in the know but not something I am ready to reveal yet. The other would be to focus on a conventional science fiction project for one of the short markets. Over the last few years there has been a fair amount of change and turnover as well as the emergence of new markets. E-mail submissions have changed the game to a certain degree as well. So we’ll see where I go in July when I get there.

The only real question, one which I will not deal with right now, is what to do once the semester starts. Writing, historically, has ground to a screeching halt once the teaching semester started. Granted, it still sort of puttered along during the 07-08 academic year, which is why The Limb Knitter was ready for submission to Apex. After that, however, the wheels pretty well came off in many respects and here we are four years later with two publication credits to my name.

It is worse than being a new writer who aspires. It is like knowing that you did some terribly difficult thing in your past and now, for whatever reason, do not seem to be capable of recreating that difficult thing.

Another thing has occurred to me.

I need a standing desk to work at. And as I’ve written before, the laptop keys even on my new Toshiba are simply not as responsive as I’d like. This will probably be the last laptop I get and before long, it’ll be converted into a defacto desktop. Mobile computing in the future will probably be performed using an iPad.

So it goes on that front.

The Fitness Front

It rained last night and the temp is cool enough to convince me that getting in the pool for laps is a bad idea. I don’t need aching joints all day while I’m on the poo deck. Besides, roaming will give me plenty of exercise.

Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Kansas City, Missouri

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