STILL HERE

  This title has a dual meaning.  I'm still here, meaning that although I've shamefully neglected my blog over the past two weeks, I still exist.  I just haven't had time for much of anything outside of working at my Paying Job during the day and working at my Nonpaying Job - writing - in the evenings.  Because - and here is the second meaning of the title - my Muse is STILL HERE.  She has hung around for two weeks now, bless her, and she and I have accomplished a lot of revision during her visit.  There have been evenings when she's been here and willing to jump in, but I've been too tired even for her.  For the most part, though, we've been hustling, she and I.
     Amazingly, the crazy system I came up with for adding a new plotline to my book has been working, for the most part.  I haven't completely written each chunk, but I've written enough to know what happens in each episode as well as approximately when in the existing story it has to happen.  Last weekend I drew up on a big sheet of drawing paper a chapter-by-chapter, month-by-month timeline for the book as it then existed, and then I began the process of figuring out where each new partial chunk of story belongs.  And since then I've been transferring those chunks, one at a time, from Document #2 to Document #1, and then fleshing them out with the new ideas that the Muse keeps feeding me.  It's a messy process, but progress is being made.  Of course, once all the partial chunks are in place (which should occur fairly soon, I hope) I'll still have to complete them.  And even then I won't be close to done because I'll have to go through the entire book line-by-line and figure out what needs to be added, or subtracted, or woven together.  But that's all okay, because I can see the endpoint far off on the horizon.
     So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.  The world swirls around me and I ignore it all and focus on my book, watching it come to life word by word, emotion by emotion, link by link. 
     Lord, this makes me happy.