Thursday, April 9, 2009

Sleepless in Ghent

I cannot sleep tonight. It might have been the 20 oz. Baja Blast Mountain Dew, but I wouldn't want to proceed without more data.

I'm working on the ending of my novel. I've been working on the ending since... oh... late December? Early January? Over three months now. I wrote the whole bloody first half in three months.

Huh. I didn't realize that until I typed it.

I'd heard somewhere that endings tend to be rough because they get the least work; you edit every other part of a story on your way to the ending, so the ending gets the short end. If this ending blows, I can at least shoot down that reason. Over-editing, for the win!

I need to sleep. I seriously need to sleep. I was sick this morning from bad Chinese, and I was almost late one other day this week (from wonderful, obsessive drawing). Archaeology is my day job. I need to show up for it!

I wanna I wanna I wanna make a webcomic. That's keeping me up too- the ideas, the images, buzzing between my ears. I wanna be done with this book. I want pretty little bug-eyed freak comic characters to be my babies for a while, not this white whale of a text. (There. Multiple alarms set for the morning. Maybe now I'll get there on time.) I haven't drawn this much in years. I come home from work, I eat, and then I draw and write until I pass out.

Except today. Today I played Guild Wars and then I discovered I'm to the point that if I don't write and draw then I can't pass out.

Being unemployed made me not trust Archaeology. I mean, it's a nice job, except that I can't write when I'm out there. Being unemployed made me trust writing. Everything else was worse; writing was better. It hurt a little to leave my story, even though I was editing, even though I was tossing out endings, deleting pages and pages of work with out a second thought because, after all, it just meant another day to write.

Hrm. Separation anxiety? It's possible. I've been writing it in fits and starts- three months here, three months there- since 2005. I just want it to be right, before I let it go. I keep telling myself, if I bang out the text of the ending, I can let it go for a month before I edit. But a part of me wails at that. I am editing. I've been editing for months, really. I WANT IT DONE.

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