In Little Room Confining Mighty Men

I said to someone once somewhere that writing novels does not get easier the more you do it.  Oh, you grow more dextrous with the craft as you work at it, that's certain.  I am losing my hack-job quality of going about it, much to my relief.  They say practice makes perfect (they are lying, of course, but it's a nice sentiment) but what they don't tell you is that, if you really love your art, it is only going to get harder.  You will get better at facing the challenge, but the wave beyond the next one is always going to be higher, colder, more blood-curdling - and if you've got an ounce of self-dignity in you, you're going to suck in your breath and plunge into that wave all the same.

I knew Gingerune was going to be a difficult wave.  What I did not expect was the speed with which it overtook me.  Only a few days ago I was bobbing merrily in the mellow seas of Plenilune, a year and a half of familiar waters, content with characters I had come to know, places I had come to love, a plot I had already well hashed out and was just fitting into form.  I look back on it and think, "Well.  That wasn't so bad."  And then I turn and look into the shadows at the shapeless form of Gingerune, as yet mercurial and mysterious, unwilling to give up its secrets to me, and I know I'm going to have to play the old going-down-the-rabbit-hole game with it: chasing after it word by word, taking sudden turns of thought after characters whose habits of mind I do not yet know, following where they lead, exploring a world beyond my cozy realm of tongue-in-cheek Shakespearean quotations and bizarre biblical references.  With Gingerune I feel as if I am going out alone into the dark, my imagination a bare, faint spark, my fingers stringing words together like beads, and I'm waiting for that magical moment when the formlessness of the idea in my mind suddenly clicks with the hesitant pictures my hand is making. 

My walls are changing.  Many of the old sticky-notes for Plenilune have been taken down, used up and ruthlessly discarded.  New notes are going up.  New pieces of paper, like the Standards of legionary companies, staggered in pink on a green background.  A drawing of my main character stares accusingly at me from beside Jefferies' monitor screen.  A new world is piecing itself together in my head.

A new novel has begun.