~~ "She has so many aliases, you'd think she was a spy!" ~~

Sunday, February 17, 2008

PCD and other ailments of the psyche

Yes, I have PCD (post-concert depression). It’s almost a little worse right now, because I had the chance to go to the Vegas show tonight—knew someone selling a front-row ticket, had offers of a ride and a hotel-room share, and would’ve gotten into the Foundation Room afterwards—and after agonizing over it for a day, in the end I obviously chose not to. I’m not fully convinced it was the right choice, but in the immortal words of Burnard & Sullivan (Shock! Not Gilbert & Sullivan, which I’ve been lead to believe since high school!) in Cox and Box, “Oh, it’s too late now.”

I’m tired, I have raspy sexy Concert Voice, and I’m here at Lulu’s struggling to switch from Concert Brain to Writing Brain. I’m strongly considering going to the Novel Workshop in Oregon over my birthday weekend, but that means I not only have to finish Ghosted by the end of this month to get my damned Beautiful Trophy, but I have to have the synopsis and 50 pp. to Dean by March 10 and the full novel ready for two readers at about the same time. The problem is that I’m such a pantser that Ghosted is really all over the place—I’m not sure how all the scenes are supposed to go together, so I’m writing scenes that need to be in there and I’ll figure out how to thread them together later…which means there will be moving things around and weaving things together and picking apart things that no longer flow and stitching it all back together… And editing is the part that’s hardest for me.

I’m going to really hammer at it this week, and if by the end of the week I truly feel I can get it done in time, I’ll sign up for the workshop. Ken and I will go up on the bike and then wander around the coast for a few days afterwards, so I can finally have the birthday trip that was aborted two years ago when I ended up in the ER on my birthday. We won’t go all the way up into Washington, but there’s enough on the Oregon and California coasts to amuse us for days, if not weeks.

Unless, of course, I want to pay through the nose for scalped tickets to the Manchester, NH, Styx/REO/Def Leppard show that’s on my actual birthday…

But either way, I have to get into Writer Brain, and sending Nikki to a rock concert is not something that in any way needs to happen in my book, even if one of the ghosts already in the book was a secret girlfriend of Jim Morrison. And I do not need to think about a sequel involving rock star ghosts.

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Currently Reading: Sea Change, Robert B. Parker
Lately Listened To: Um. Duh.
Recently Watched: Torchwood, Lost, If Walls Could Talk

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