Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 91

The Outer Banks

Last summer, my father married a North Carolina native. For their anniversary this year, he rented a house on the Outer Banks, in the town of Duck, North Carolina, and invited the whole family to come. For the past seven days, I shared a house with my siblings and my nieces and nephews. Ahead of time, the local family was planning events–trips to historic attractions, plays, gardens, and so on. I decided against that form of vacation. Instead, my vacation days looked like this:

Get up early and walk the dog on the beach.

Eat a lovely breakfast.

Here’s my favorite: french toast with lemon ginger marmalade. So yummy.

Play with the kids or talk to family. I let all the kids teach me their favorite iPad games, and am addicted to a new one called Puzzle and Dragons–it’s like a combination of Bejeweled and Pokemon.

Head back to the beach with the dog. Hang out in the sun. Throw the ball as many times as she’ll chase it.

Zelda’s a great beach dog. Well-behaved off-leash and loves the water

Walk back to the house. Have some quiet time. I meant to write, but that didn’t happen. Mostly I curled up with Zelda and played iPad games.

Eat some lunch and start cooking dinner. We had flank steak one night, using my mom’s marinade recipe, with corn on the cob, salad, and fruit salad. Home-made French onion soup, followed by chicken in a lime-sriracha-butter sauce another. Tortilla wraps with grilled chicken or spicy shrimp and homemade guacamole and mango salsa a third. Sausages–chicken apple or spicy manchego–the fourth, plus grilled shrimp, watermelon, cantaloupe, artichoke crab dip, a spicy pepper-onion relish over cream cheese on crackers. I could flood the bandwidth with pictures of food but will spare you. Well, maybe just one.

I thought I bought enough steak for two meals but I wasn’t counting on the teenage boys.

After dinner, another walk back to the beach.

Sunset (I think, anyway!)

Most days included a little something else: a lunchtime visit to a restaurant where R and I split a plate of oysters; an ice cream cone at the Duck boardwalk; grocery shopping at a lovely store where we tried Dandelion & Burdock soda (tastes like medicine); a visit to the candy shop with niece in tow where we debated candy for everyone and wound up with Sugar Babies, candy Legos, sour balls, ginger chews, and creamy mints; trips to visit the step-siblings; a birthday celebration; a couple of dinners out–fish, crab legs, lobster salad–all delicious; splashing in the swimming pool–sometimes as I was cooking dinner on the grill at the same time.

But mostly it was long days filled with lots of sand, sun, saltwater, food, and family. I’m home now, a little exhausted from the long drive–almost fourteen hours and the dog was so worried about being left behind that she didn’t get out of my lap once!–but eager to get back to writing. And nostalgic already.

In 17 days, R heads off to school in Seattle. I don’t know when or if we’ll ever have another family vacation like this one, but I tried to savor every lovely minute of it.

Scoliid wasp

It hurts just as much to be stung by a pretty wasp

This wasp stung me.*

In a perfect metaphor for my psychological make-up, I immediately started excusing it. I disturbed it. It was startled. Blah-blah-blah.

You know what? Making excuses for the wasp didn’t make the sting stop hurting.

Lavendar oil, however, was quite effective. Also, R hit the wasp’s dead body with a hammer. That helped, too.

*Possibly I’m condemning the wasp unfairly. I didn’t actually see what stung me. I’m just going by the fact that I started hurting, dramatically jumped and dropped the palm frond I was carrying, and then the wasp was in the pool when it hadn’t been a few moments earlier. Also, you know, it hurt. A lot. And this little note really adds to my metaphor, doesn’t it?

A course in editing that doesn’t exist

So I applied for a teaching job about three weeks ago, one that sounded sort of astonishingly perfect for me. It would be for a college level course on editing and revisions at a career-focused school. Alas, I haven’t heard a word back, not even the basic form letter acknowledgement that I applied. I’m thinking I give it another week or so and then move on. My problem, though, is that my brain doesn’t want to move on. During my long dog walks, when I’m supposed to be thinking about my villain and how his conversation with Natalya goes, I’m pondering knowledge and lectures and teaching methods.

How would I structure a course in editing? How would I structure class time? What kinds of activities could teach someone how to edit their work? What’s the best learning style for an activity that is usually solitary? What’s the most important information that I’d want students to walk away with? How would the process be different for screenwriters and game designers?

I’m thinking if I write some of it down, I’ll be able to let go of it. So here goes. (And if you have no interest in learning about editing and revisions and information design and learning theory, come back next week, instead. Maybe I’ll write about ducks again.)

The course takes four weeks, so I’d structure the overall arc as:

Week 1: First readers

Alphas, betas, and OSC’s concept of a “wise reader.”

Building a support team of early readers
Communicating


Critique groups, online and off. Pros/cons.

KRusch on perfection


Responding to critiques

Neil Gaiman: “Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

Collaborating (important for screenwriters and game designers, less so for novelists) and communication.

Depending on the size of the class, I’d break them into groups that they’ll stay in for the length of the course, so that each student’s project gets an alpha, beta, and wise read from one other student, and each student also provides an alpha, beta, and wise read for one other student. So groups of four would be the ideal, but if it didn’t work out that way, I’d figure it out. Possibly pairs with three sets of reads instead of the team approach. That might work better, anyway.

Week 2: Structural and developmental editing

The job of a structural or developmental editor or producer(?). Revision requests.
Pacing

The three-act structure: hook, conflict, climax
Story beats


Characterization

Making your characters work. Goals, motivations
Dialogue: tightening, tweaking, finding authentic voices, key words. Reading aloud.
Character details, choosing the right level & info

Minor characters don’t need names or backstories
Major characters – quick sketches plus meaningful info, killing details that don’t influence plot or story



Details: “Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick; it’s work. … Belief and reader absorption come in the details: An overturned tricycle in the gutter of an abandoned neighborhood can stand for everything.” —Stephen King in Writer’s Digest

Criteria-based content analysis for strong storytelling: choosing the right details
Subtext and foreshadowing (Joss Whedon examples from Firefly, ie the set up for the stranded in space episode)
TVTropes: The Law of Conservation of Detail
Visualization and sensory information

Visualization esp. vital for screenplays – setting mood and tone

Week 3: Copy-editing (“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative.”—Elmore Leonard)

Stylesheets & background info: names, places, details
Knowing yourself — developing individual checklists for your own common errors
The fundamental grammar mistakes (it’s vs its, they’re vs their) and tricks for checking on them
Repetitions and word choices
Stronger verbs, passive voice
Adjectives, adverbs – how to decide if they’re useful (cut/come back later)
Tightening, cutting unnecessary words (Elements of Style?)
Online editors – prowritingaid.com, autocrit.com, others

Week 4: Proofreading & Formatting

Fresh eyes – the need for a break between editing and proofing
Tricks – putting the file into another format (Kindle, paper, different font size), reading aloud, listening to it read aloud (computer), blocking off lines with paper or a ruler, reading it backwards
Using Find & Replace (carefully!)
Punctuation issues (?)
Using styles and shortcuts
Cleaning up hidden code (Sigil?)
Formatting rules for different types of files, ie screenplay rules, game rules, etc.

I suspect that the actual breakdown of classes wouldn’t be by weeks. The biggest and best topics all come in week 2, but a lot of the work comes in week 3 and 4, given that the students don’t really have enough time to do serious revisions on a major work. They might discover that a major revision, like deleting a character, would improve the work, but not have time to do it. So probably each class during week 3 and 4 would be half the subject of the week and half more on one of the topics from week 2. Blend things up a bit. Hmm, possibly the way to go would be to have half the class time be on the subject and half be spent looking at their own real work, in discussion format, with a focused topic, such as details or dialogue or subtext.

And speaking of classes…

I’d want to start each class with an exercise. Something experiential and engaging, that immediately gets the brain moving onto the topic at hand. I don’t even know how many classes there are so how many exercises I’d need to create (8? 12?), but examples would be things like:

1) Rewrite a scene (15-20 lines of dialogue) so that one of the characters is different (older/younger/other gendered/different culture/the villain/attracted to the other char/etc.). After ten minutes, share some lines.

2) Act a scene from one of the students’ works, student as casting director, lines read aloud. Discussion on lines afterward – did they feel fluid? Reveal character? Work as read?

3) Pick a movie quote. Why is it good? (Or bad.)

4) Find a trope used in your work (from TVtropes). Discuss if you subvert it and how, or why it works as stated in your work.

5) Create a wordcloud (wordle.net) of your WIP. Any words in there that shouldn’t be?

Hmm, possibly I’m writing homework assignments here. And possibly when I haven’t come up with an engaging exercise, I’d start the class by having them partner up with one of their first reader partners and discuss a specific piece of feedback and/or a specific scene that could use tweaking.

So, class starts with an exercise (goal: engage brain through active participation), then moves on to lecture, probably about 45 minutes. Then, alas, a quiz. I’d do a quiz in every class because of the sad fact that quizzes improve information retention. In learning theory, the more times you’re exposed to a fact and the more different ways in which you’re exposed to a fact, the better your chances are of actually remembering the fact. That’s why lectures with visuals are better than lectures without. But the perfect combo is listening, seeing, and doing. And quizzes are a good way to do.

But I hate quizzes just like everybody else in the world hates quizzes, so I’d make it so that any incorrect answers can be fixed after grading by taking the quiz home and re-doing it as open book. It becomes double homework then, so there’s motivation to just do it right the first time, but it also removes at least some of the test-taking pressure. I don’t want students sitting in dread through the first half of the class worrying about the quiz.

After the quiz a break, followed by a lecture that ideally combines experiential work. Depending on what kind of homework I’m giving, it might include some sort of homework review. For example, in the copy-editing week, we could look at the style-sheets they’ve created. But that might be boring, too. I’ll have to think some more about that.

I think the thing that makes me so very interested in teaching this class is that it so easily combines two things I love: editing and story. I love character. It’s my favorite aspect of story-telling. And you can’t edit without thinking about character. But I also love editing. I love spotting the repetition and tweaking the words and looking for the stronger verbs and tightening without removing meaning. And also, of course, after twenty years as an editor, it’s my one true area of expertise. I’m okay at lots of stuff in the world, I’m good at several things, but I’m an excellent editor. And teaching it—well, it just seems as if it would be really fun.

And now that I’ve spent three hours writing all that down, can I let it go? I hope so, because planning course curriculum for a job that I haven’t got is, at best, an exercise in frustration. I should plan a curriculum for a course in self-publishing instead, because that one I could probably find a way to teach on my own. Also, of course, even if they did hire me to teach this class, they might have a curriculum of their own that I was supposed to use. Ooh, imagine how frustrating that would be. Perhaps I shall be glad that I got the pleasure of writing it and thinking about it and let that be sufficient unto the day. I should really be writing a novel instead!

Tumblr2

A super-quick follow-up: if you, like me, need help getting started on tumblr, here’s a good place to begin: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/20...

I’ve been flirting with tumblr for months and I didn’t know all the info in that article. Plus, links!

Tumblr

I’ve had website addictions come and go, but I think my current addiction to Tumblr might last a while.

Back in 2007, I liked Twitter a lot. I had it open most of the time, watching people I know having fun. It felt like eavesdropping on the people chatting by the coffee pot at work. I didn’t talk much, but I liked listening. Then it turned into a chaotic mess. People I liked stopped talking, and the relationship of follower-to-following went from friends chatting to a one-to-many communication means that way too many people were using as a sales tool. I still find occasional interesting stuff on Twitter, but I only go there when I’m desperately bored.

For a while, I checked Facebook every day. But it’s been ruined by the ads and the weird filtering for me. I go there at most once a week now, because all I see are the sponsored posts. It’s like choosing to turn on the television to watch commercials. Why would I bother? I check it mostly to make sure no one’s saying anything directly to me to which I am rudely not responding. I don’t even have it bookmarked anymore.

I never managed to get into Pinterest. It’s pretty, but it seems like so much work. And I’m sort of queasy about the idea of posting images that don’t belong to me. I just don’t see how Pinterest isn’t a violation of creator’s rights. Even if I pin something that I credit to the place where I found it, how do I know whether that person has properly credited the creator? I joined and browsed and I understand the appeal, but it never worked for me.

I’ve played with reddit, “front page of the internet.” It was fun for a while. I’d say three months. But I never found a place that felt like home there. With dozens of sub-reddits, it seems plausible that such a place exists, but if it does, it’s in some obscure corner that I never stumbled upon. I still visit sometimes–there’s a lot of interesting stuff there–but it doesn’t call me.

Tumblr, on the other hand, now beckons on an hourly basis. I didn’t get the point of tumblr. Like, not at all. It completely confused me. I joined it for #UFYH. I have no idea how I found #UFYH — I’m sure I stumbled upon it in a blog somewhere. But I joined tumblr so I could tell the #UFYH lady thank you. That was months and months ago. And I never really figured out what to do with it. Follow people? But how do I know who to follow or why? Lately, though, I’ve hit some critical mass of people that I’m following — plus discovered the like and reblog buttons! — and I’ve realized that tumblr is the bee’s knees. People are having conversations there. Interesting conversations that are taking place in a way that’s easy to follow. Profound conversations about life and media and symbolism and sex, and also amusing conversations about Supernatural and Sherlock and baby bunnies and cute boys. There are pictures — art and comics and gifs and incredible, drop-dead gorgeous scenery — and jokes and serious moments and political statements. It’s everything — the trivial, the serious, the thoughtful, the superficial. I’m pretty much in love.

Of course, they just got acquired by yahoo and so perhaps I’m at exactly the wrong moment in tumblr’s history — hitting its peak, just in time for the stupid sponsored ads to take over the show and end the party. But even if that happens, I’m really glad to be at the party right now. (Except, you know, for the fact that it’s a total time sink. But then the internet is like that!)

In other news, rain, rain, and more rain, surrounded by thunderstorms that last for hours. Zelda dislikes thunder. Yesterday, she tried to climb into my non-existent lap while I was standing at the sink, washing dishes. I tried to get a picture, but there wasn’t enough light. Here she is, however, preventing me from writing by sitting on my chest. Why she thinks on top of me is the safest place to be when the thunder rumbles, I couldn’t say.

Ducks

There’s a mixed-race couple of ducks in my neighborhood that charms me. I like to imagine how they got together, to make up stories of what they thought when they met each other, who was the first one to decide, “Maybe you’re not so bad, I could do with you,” and whether she says to him every morning, “Okay, today we’ll stick together, but tomorrow you’re out.”

Male ducks are notorious rapists, forcing themselves on unwilling female ducks, and even ganging up in little packs to attack solo females. But in this case, the male is a mallard and the female is a big white duck, probably an escaped domestic. She’s 50% again his size. I don’t let the dog go near the ducks anyway — ducks have it rough enough without needing to escape curious Jack Russell terriers — but the white duck is bigger than Zelda, and I suspect she could do damage if she felt threatened. She’s definitely not letting the little mallard bully her.

I am actually making an assumption about the white duck–it could be a male. But it used to be alone. A little flock of mallards patrolled the lake, while the white duck hung out in a corner by itself. Then the mallards split up into pairs, leaving a lone male to sulk on the side of the lake, moping and making the occasional hostile run at the others. Over the past week or so, lone male mallard and white duck have moved closer and closer together. Several days ago, as we were walking down the path, lone male gave a warning chirp and woke up white duck. They waddled away in the same direction. Yesterday and today, they were together. Not snuggled, not like the pairs of mallards, wing-to-wing as they float on the peaceful water, but with only a couple of feet separating them.

Two lonely ducks, finding each other.

It might actually be the most romantic thing I’ve ever witnessed.

No picture of the ducks, because I can’t seem to remember to carry my phone with me, but here are some pretty flowers.

I have no idea what these flowers are, but I like them.

Lessons Learned

So it’s been ten days or so since my hard drive died and I’m finally truly back online. My apologies for the comments I let sit in the queue while I was gone — I wasn’t logged into the blog on my iPad and I knew I didn’t want to try to write any posts, so it was only this morning when I started to write that I realized a) that I didn’t know the password to my blog and b) that there were comments. Oops.

Most important lesson learned: Passwords. Argh. Double argh. I try to be good and make reasonably challenging passwords and differentiate them for different sites — you know, the basics of password safety. I kept an obscure document on my hard drive with codes that I would understand but that anyone else would have trouble figuring out to remind me what my passwords were. Not the kind of thing that someone else could find and make sense of, but hints for me. Like: A-Pbd-Rn#2, which would mean that my Amazon password was my friend’s birthday followed by my son’s name with a couple obvious numbers substituted for letters. Safe, right? Until I lost my hard drive. Password recovery has been tedious to say the least. If I hadn’t had my iPad, I could easily have gotten trapped in a nightmare where sites would send my passwords to email addresses that I couldn’t access because I didn’t have the password. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Still, I definitely need to find a new password system. I may try one of the sites that manage them for you, but at the very least, I’m going to be putting my mysterious codes onto actual paper from now on!

Second lesson: Windows 8 is hell. Whose idea was it to make the trackpad consider a swipe to the left as a signal to change applications? How are you supposed to move the cursor if every swipe puts you into a different application? Finding where my applications hid after I installed them was tedious. Realizing that classic Spider solitaire was gone was … well, probably good for me, but I may have a few anxiety attacks over it in the future. Setting up my mail turned out to be impossible. I kept talking to the computer, telling it that my iPad managed just fine with the exact same information, and the computer kept telling me, nope, can’t help you. I finally gave up. From now on, I’ll be reading email on my iPad and if I need to write anything lengthy, I’ll turn back to the laptop and use the web. Color me not impressed.

However — third lesson — I am impressed with my iPad. I used Pages to write with an external keyboard. It took me a bit to get used to it. There are definitely usability changes, like the way it saves documents and the clunky filing system, which required some adaptation on my part. Needing to select with fingers was frustrating — I want a keyboard command that lets me start a selection and cursor arrow control so that I don’t have to keep taking my hands off the keyboard to make minor changes. And it doesn’t have commenting, so long-term, there’s no way I’m going to use it. I can’t imagine trying to do revisions without the ability to leave notes for myself that are easily findable and deletable. But overall, Pages is great. The simplicity, the clarity, the style — I’m not actually sure what it was that made it such a pleasant writing experience. It wasn’t perfect. The dog was not a fan at all, because she couldn’t cuddle up to my side without blocking my view of the iPad. But I found it much better than I expected to and actually enjoyed writing on it. When I opened up a Word document yesterday, I was tempted to go back to Pages.

Fourth lesson: writing. It turns out that losing my hard drive may have been a blessing in disguise. I’ve been writing Time for so long now — in a few weeks, it will have been a full year! — but a huge amount of that time has been revising the same scenes over and over and over again. There’s a scene in Maggie’s bistro that I had probably a solid dozen versions of. It’s a conversation with Nat and Grace and Akira and Sylvie and it covered a lot of ground in terms of both back-story and world-building. Every time I rewrote it, I tried to save the best parts from the previous versions, the parts that worked. The final version — now lost — was a patchwork quilt. I think it was a pretty good patchwork quilt. I was actually satisfied with the last version of it. But rewriting it, without having the previous versions to base my ideas on, is almost liberating. It’s flowing instead of chunking its way along.

I’m 18,000 words into the story now, about half of where I was, and it’s actually moving well. Instead of feeling like I’m grinding the words out, continually going back and checking what I’d written before, trying to make pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, I know what the story is and I’m just writing it. And the characters are having fun. Grace took over a scene in a very Grace-like way, with dialog that amused me enough that I had that little glow of delight that is the best part of writing. First time I’ve felt that in months.

Anyway…I’m going to go back to writing Time now, because just remembering how I felt about it before I got distracted by the arrival of a replacement computer brightens my day. But I’m not mourning my hard drive anymore. I wish it hadn’t died, but it’s okay that it did. But thank you all for your sympathy!

Dead hard drive

I’m wondering if I can write a book on an iPad. I think the answer is probably not.

I’ll skip most of the details, but my laptop’s hard drive appears to be dead. About 24 hours into the nightmare, I decided it might be time to give up on saving my files. Goodbye 80 zillion versions of A Gift of Time, goodbye my outline. Goodbye all my notes for A Lonely Magic, goodbye everything except the first thousand words of Akira’s trip to Belize. Goodbye Belize cover, goodbye…okay, then I decided that maybe it would be worth trying harder.

Another 6 hours, $60, massive frustration and — I admit it — a few tears, and it appears that not only my hard drive failed, my USB backup drive failed. That just kills me. Like… no. Just no, no, no.

It’s the kind of problem that under other circumstances I would just throw money at. Find a good IT guy — maybe the laptop place I used once before — and pay whatever it takes to see what he or she could do. I’m pretty sure that the hard drive at least has recoverable files. But I don’t have any money these days, so even though I can pretty much guarantee that I’m going to wind up spending something on this, I want it to be as sensible a spending as possible and that means thinking about it.

Password recovery over the next few weeks is going to be such a hassle. And A Gift of Time — well, I told R sometime yesterday afternoon that this was feeling like it, that this was simply not a project meant to be happen, and I should find out if McDonald’s is hiring, and he told me not to be stupid. I glared, he apologized and said what he had to say a little more politely. But the idea that I’m starting over again – this time not by choice — is… well, it doesn’t feel good. I know I can resurrect a lot. It wouldn’t be like starting at the very first word. But… maybe I’ll go watch TV for a while.

Endings

Eight years ago, I came home from a meeting that had been like a lightning bolt to the heart and said to R, oh, so carefully, “Are M and W the same to you?”

Eagerly and with no hesitation, he said, “Yes! And 3 and E — why are they all alike?”

I didn’t cry. I wanted to. I’d just spent an hour listening to an academic psychologist tell me of the results of two days of intensive testing. My boy — my brilliant, delightful, wonderful, charming boy — tested as severely learning disabled. His ability to decode letters was below the 1% mark.

The psychologist — with every kind intention, I believe — told me that I should be prepared for him to never learn to read. But that it was okay, really. No better time to have a profound learning disability. Dictation software, audio books, a society that understood (more or less) that dyslexia had been proven via functional magnetic resonance imaging to be a brain-based difference, not a stubborn refusal to learn or stupidity — it would be okay that he was dyslexic.

It wasn’t okay with me. Or rather, it was okay that he was dyslexic, but it wasn’t okay with me that he wouldn’t read. Reading had always been my greatest joy. Escaping into other worlds saved my life. Books were what made life bearable. The idea that R could never share that? Totally not okay.

Yesterday was his last day of 11th grade. He’s going to Seattle for his senior year. He wants to try a public school. He wants to experience big classes and lots of people and school buses. (He’s out of luck on the last, but maybe there’ll be a field trip or something.) He only needs one math class to graduate from his current school and they’re going to accept his Seattle adventure, so however it goes overall, he’ll probably come back here to graduate next year. But mostly, my participation in his education is done.

He got a 98 on his final paper for AP English. He got a 34 (out of 36) on the reading portion of the ACT. He read the Game of Thrones series for fun.

I am so proud of what he’s accomplished that I could explode with it. But I’m also filled with something that feels like — I don’t know what. We moved to Florida so that he could go to a school that specialized in learning disabilities. We moved to our current house so that he could go to his current school. We live where we live because I thought he’d have the best chance of getting an education that would fit him perfectly here. And now… I’m done. I did it. He did it.

It’s like letting go of a balloon and watching it rise into the sky. You’re half delighted to see the balloon go — WOW! Look how high it can fly — and you’re half broken-hearted at the loss.

My boy is flying. I’m so proud of him.

Dream

I dreamed last night that I got a one-star review on A Gift of Ghosts. And not just a one-star review, a really mean, really hateful one-star. I’m personally a firm believer in everyone’s right to not like something and say so — the world would be bland and boring if everyone had exactly the same taste — but this review was different.

I just started to edit the first line of this post, but then I stopped myself. See, I actually think that reviews belong to the book, not the author. When Ghosts is reviewed, it’s the book that gets the review, not me. Instead of “I got,” that line should read “Ghosts got a one-star review.” I believe reviews are about the person who wrote them first, the story second, the author of the story a far distant third, and I try not to take them personally. (I wrote that originally “I don’t take them personally,” but I’m not a saint — of course there are times when a mean review lingers. But I try!)

Anyway, my opening line is actually right the way I wrote it in this context, because this hateful review was me. It was me being mean to me. And I realized it even before I woke up. (I admit, I did go check Amazon just to make sure I hadn’t found it while half-asleep and imagine that I was dreaming it, but no surprise, it wasn’t there.) Nobody is meaner to me than I am.

So… new plan for today. Not continuing rewriting Time from scratch — or giving up entirely, which was where I was at yesterday — but figuring out how to keep the parts I like of old Time, while resolving the plot holes that were giving me a nagging itch of incompetence.

The worst part — really, the only negative part of self-publishing in my experience — is that there is no one around to save me from myself, for both good and bad. No one to say, “Yes, you’re right, this isn’t working,” and toss out some suggestions for fixes but equally, no one to say, “No, you’re wrong, stop trying to re-invent the wheel and just have fun.”