We’ve been having a terrible summer so far here on the coast of Maine - it’s been cool, rainy, and generally unpleasant. In June we had only a handful of sunny days; July has not been much better. It has taken its toll on my garden: yesterday we pulled out twelve beautiful tomato plants that had been doing quite nicely until they were struck with a fungal infection commonly known as Late Blight. According to what I read on the University of Maine Cooperative Extension’s website, the fungus that causes Late Blight is the same one responsible for the Irish Potato Famine - ah, well, if one is going to lose one’s tomato crop, it might as well be to something historically significant.
The upside to all this rain is plenty of time to stay inside cozied up to the computer to write. For the past year most of my writing time went to penning the five mysteries that will make up the new MSW interactive computer game being released this fall by Legacy Interactive. I set aside my own projects so I could work on those five stories without distraction - necessary, because honestly, I can’t keep that many creative balls in the air all at once. But now the Legacy project is pretty much over with (at least as far as my contribution goes), so I have finally been able to go back to my “Works in Progress” file and pick up where I left off on some stories of my own. It’s about time, too: not counting entries for the FanFic 100 writing challenge, the last full-length story I finished was “Taken Out at the Ballgame,” which I published on the Definitive Guide in November of 2007. Where did 2008 go? Oh, yeah - Legacy Interactive.
These days it takes me a very long time to complete a story. A few years ago - I guess at this point you could call it several years ago - I was able to write tight, relatively short stories averaging around 20 pages or so, single spaced. After the Big Hiatus (during which I got married, purchased my own veterinary clinic, and moved) something changed and the stories started getting longer and more complex. I know part of what changed was the incorporation of the Jessica/George relationship as a major theme - giving page time to that as well as to the fundamental mystery has definitely resulted in longer works. But even my non-relationship stories have gotten longer: “Taken Out” is nearly forty pages long, and George isn’t mentioned even once. Does this mean I’m maturing as a writer? Maybe, but it’s equally likely that it just means I spend too much time writing about relationships and baseball these days.
Anyway, in my “Works in Progress” file I found two unfinished stories begun in 2007 and one of more recent vintage (I’m not going to detail what they’re about, because that’s just how I roll). Leaving aside that last one, which doesn’t interest me much at the moment, I’ve used my rainy days to take up the other two once more. I used to work on one story at a time, but I think I actually prefer having two or more going at once. I like the flexibility it gives me - I can bounce from one to the other depending on my mood, and play around with them until one seriously grabs my attention and demands to be finished. The shorter one (“short” is a relative term here, as I think it will ultimately weigh in at about 80 pages) is probably the one I’ll finish first, which is just as well because it precedes the other chronologically. As for that other, it looks like it’s going to be another book length monstrosity; it will be awhile yet before it’s completed. But all this rainy weather means that something, at least, will probably be completed before fall - and that is my silver lining.
