Procrastination

I’ll do that… decide that… think about that… tomorrow. Or the next day. I’m a champ at it. In fact, I’m so good at it that they should name a disease after me, like I’m the first and only one afflicted with this level of putting things off. Only not my real name. Use my avatar, Wayzgoose. When you are feeling incredibly lethargic and it is too much effort to heat soup for dinner (I sliced up some summer sausage with Ritz crackers for dinner last night and that was almost too much work) then you can sigh and say, “I’ve been Wayzgoosed. I’ll do better tomorrow.”

I love the entrance sign for Glen Eden, but tell me if I'm wrong.

That guy is sunburned, isn't he?

My latest delay is the fact that I haven’t decided where to go when I leave here. My ‘schedule’ says that I’m supposed to leave Glen Eden at noon today and go… somewhere. In my usual ‘just in time’ fashion, I walked into the office yesterday afternoon and extended my stay through Sunday. Now I can wait until Monday to decide what direction I’m going.

That’s not to say that I’m doing nothing. My perennial excuse for not getting things I ‘should’ done is that I’m writing. I managed some 78,000 words in February, most of which (60,000) are in the rewrite of City Limits. As extensive as this rewrite is, it’s like starting from the ground up. In fact, just last night I wrote a scene that is very important to the new story, but significantly changes a major plotline of the novel. I need to spend time today evaluating whether the importance of this scene to the revised story is important enough to change or abandon the previous plotline. And if I decide against it, it won’t be the first time in this rewrite that I write a thousand words and then delete them.

My February writing goals have been adequately exceeded after a rocky start to the month while I fought off a head-numbing cold.

I’ve set City Limits in an Eastern U.S. town with a population of 4,190. I’ve kept the exact location a little vague, but it could be anywhere from Southern New York State through Pennsylvania Maryland or Virginia. But I’ve lived much of my life in or near smaller cities. The model of Main Street that I’m using in my head is that of North Manchester, Indiana, a town only slightly larger than my target. But ‘small city’ means something very different in different places. The little town of Lake Elsinore just south of where I am in Southern California, has a population of over 51,000. That’s a fair-sized city where I come from.

I watched Twin Peaks while I was preparing to write this and one of the things I noticed was that the story views Twin Peaks as a sleepy little town in the mountains of Washington State, and even used North Bend and surrounding areas as its setting. Well, North Bend is a city with a population of 6,700. But it is obvious that the directors and writers were California-based and held a California mindset as to what a small town was. Take a look at the city limit sign for Twin Peaks from the opening credits.

This tiny town, too small and remote to have a resident judge and prosecutor and policed only by the county sheriff's department has a population of 51,201? California dreamin'!

Well, that’s just one of the things that I look at when I’m writing. For example, in a community of 4,200 people, how large is a charismatic evangelical church likely to grow? (I highly doubt it will have a thousand members!) From where, besides the City, will it attract members? How far will they be willing to drive to get to church? Are there other population centers within that radius that would build their membership? And then when I’ve done all that research, which might take days, it will show up in a sentence in the story something like, “Pastor Beck looked out at the hundred people filling the pews and was pleased with how dramatically the church had grown.” But when I say it, I’ll know that this is consistent with the kind of town I’ve created.

I need to pack my grill and propane tanks, then home sweet home is on the move.

So, I’m sitting still for a couple more days and will have a new book to lay out for a client tomorrow on a very fast, no-edits, turnaround. I plan to have it back to him before I pull up stakes on Monday. Then I’ll be leaving the brown hills that surround my little campsite and charting a path that will lead me back to Sun Meadow in Idaho by mid-May. Looking forward to seeing home!

I am looking forward to exchanging the scene of California's brown bare hills for the rich greens of Northern Idaho!