Hiding, cogitating, time-traveling.

I have just done the MOST FASCINATING bit of historical reconstruction in re the Victorian setting for That Other Story that is niggling. I was drawn to it in part because it was something I could do in 5 minute bits here and there, as opposed to the many-hours-worth of sit-down, pound-it-out writing I need to do to get ahead with the Opus (which has not been feasible to work on along with the demands of my non-fiction writing for client right now).  So, by way of at least making *some* forward progress with *something*, while I am doing geeky writing, I invested my creative energy in reconstructing Hanover Square, London, in August 1854, on the eve of the great cholera epidemic of 1854, which is the initial setting of That Other Story (or better said, Chapter 1 of that book).

After a certain amount of research and (educated) guesswork reconstructing that locale, I later found other sources that totally confirmed - down to the actual street addresses - what I had recreated on my own using my history detective skill and my google-fu.

Yes, I am inordinately full of myself right now, and Very Happy to finally be SEEING the locale and people and time and place in great and hairy intimate detail. I even have portraits of people who lived there at that exact time, from the National Portrait Gallery (UK) online.  It is that kind of close-up I need to tune into a time/place in order to write about it.   I will share with you now, also, that I have a presentiment that it is *this* book - or the quadrology I see it as the initial part of - that is the Narrative Cycle that will be primary to my writing career (not the sf/fantasy stuff I've done to date).  Hence the compelling interest here for me, and therefore I feel I scored greatly with this one.  I am so detail-oriented about this kind of thing (that's a gracious phrase for it) that I have re-created the scale-exact map (based on the appropriate Ordnance Survey map of London)  that  my  map(s)  now are populated with the real-life families and institutions that existed at specific addresses there/then. 

All this is to say, I can now see this microcosmic world at a glance, and I now know where Everything and Everyone Is, in reference to the stage setting of my story. 

That is indispensible to the way I write and time-travel to Be There, and what a relief it is to Know all that, finally!  Especially in history-based writing, you can't just throw out a made-up character in a made-up locale: people who know anything at all about the era will say, no that address didn't exist, or no, so-and-so didn't live there then. But in MY little Hanover Square world, I have that nailed. I have the right little universe happening. If you were there then in August 1854, you're on my map.

How happy that makes me, I can't begin to describe. (Anal retentive? Nawww.... It's called "historically accurate...";)

This is what I have been doing while being silent. Or one of the things, anyway.  I mean, I have been attempting to become disentangled from Tar Baby (for those who don't know the reference, Tar Baby was originally one of the old slave-told folk tales from the American South in the 1800s.  See this classic tale, here: http://home.nycap.rr.com/cyclone/disney/sots/tarbaby.htm ), and I have been generally frustrated with my income/creative work balance (as I have lately lamented here).  So, I've needed an escape that at least offered *some* degree of creative redress for my grievances. My reconstruction of Hanover Square has filled the bill, and man, don't I know a butt-load more about Victorian London now, than when I started!

Grist for the mill. Which leads me to say,

'Scuze, I must go grind, now....

I'm a novelist. I write. Supposedly. I have science fiction and fantasy books in print to prove it.

But I hit a wall a while ago and haven't gotten on with the show for some years.  My books are no longer new news. My career is past languishing and in need of CPR. 

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to re-construct myself and my life as not only a writer, but a raving full-blown FULL-TIME novelist, living the ~successful~ creative life I want to have, and have experienced bits of before. 

How to get there from here. That's why I'm *freakin'*.  Plus the fact I just commited to a delivery deadline for a book (under contract) that is long, long, overdue. Publisher doesn't care anymore why it's so late; they just want to receive the frakkin book. I finally threw down and said they'd have it by 12/1. 

So, naturally, I just left a world-class city where I mostly lived for the last 13 years, to hole up in a long-term (and I do mean long-term) writer's retreat Somewhere Else. I'm here not just for this 1 book, but for the one after (also sold), and whatever else I work on after that. 

No distractions, yes? Except for the world on my desktop, courtesy of the net.  And folks like you.

So this is my excursion. Surely I'm not the only one writhing on the horns of various creative/lifestyle/career/focus dilemmas. Or maybe, what the hell, I AM the only one going through this right now. Guess I'll find out.  At any rate, I felt the need for someplace to vent and share the process (hopefully more process than melt-downs, but no guarantees) - and get some useful feedback. Or not. Maybe I'm just screaming into cyberspace cuz it's therapeutic. Who knows.

My world, and welcome to it. 

And yes, I look exactly like my Second Life avatar, which is my user pic here. 

And now I will sell you a bridge in Brooklyn....

~Wylde~