Struggling for Words

It’s not like me to struggle for words. At least not when I’m writing. I sometimes can’t put a whole sentence together when I’m speaking. There are days when I think I’m only a few incoherent comments from becoming president. How frightening would that be!

But my struggle this month has been putting words on paper. I put on a real press at the end of July to finish the story I was working on for Camp NaNoWriMo and get it off to my editors. The last couple of days of July I even ripped off a few thousand words of the new story I’m working on. Then August 1… Nothing.

Of course, I could go through another month of not writing and still be on track with my 50,000 words per month goal for the year. But I don’t plan to do that. And I have all kinds of excuses.

It was hot.

I chose the hottest day of the year—a record-breaker by 13 degrees here—to go shopping in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene. Because I needed stuff. And because my truck was cool, I had good music, and I hadn’t been out for a couple of weeks. I noticed that most of the rectangular bales of hay had been trucked out of the fields and a couple were showing green again. I was pretty amazed at the round bale fields, though.

These big round bales weigh just under half a ton each and about 3-6 tons per acre are harvested. But hay was not the only thing on my mind when I set out. It’s great to feed the cattle and horses, but we need bread as well.

It’s been amazing to watch the hay harvest in one field and the wheat ripening in the next. I was pretty sure that the wheat harvest was about to begin and later in the day, it was confirmed.

If it hadn’t been so hot out, I could have sat on the roof of my truck for an hour, watching these huge combines bring in the food. Pretty amazing. And wheat isn’t all that’s ready to harvest. Remember those yellow fields of canola?

Well, this is what they looked like on my little journey.

I didn’t see any of the canola harvesters out. They are a different beast than the combines for wheat and I’d love to have seen them in operation. Ah yes. But I wax poetic about food and forget my purpose here… which I will remember shortly.

Editing. I’m writing a sequel to one of my most popular adult serials. It started with a challenge from a reader to write the story from the perspective of the parents of the kids coming of age in original serial. So not really a sequel. Nor is it a prequel. I’ve decided to call it an equel. The story runs parallel to the original and sometimes to itself as it is narrated by several parents whose stories overlap. Since those parents are of my generation, it is also giving me an opportunity to explore some of the things that made us tick and influenced our lives back in the sixties and forward. A lot of people have offered me stories and expertise on various aspects.

But in order to maintain consistency through the story, I needed to read the original (1.4 million words in nine books and 471 chapters). As long as I was reading, I decided to make corrections in both the proofreading and timeline to be be sure everything was consistent in the new book. I sent the first five books off to my editors as a reference with the first twelve chapters of the new work.

I've been other interesting places, too. It didn't fit in the story but I figured you needed an eye-break.

It was when I hit the third parent’s story that I realized I needed to look at the remainder of the books in the series. That happened to be August 1. Over the past twenty days, I have done almost nothing but re-read and edit the last six books of the series. And, of course, those four books were longer than the five I’d taken two months to edit.

I discovered a fair share of problems. Names that were wrong. Ages that were wrong. Homonyms. Really lousy sentences. And tears. There were a lot of sad parts to the story and I wondered as I read it what had sparked so much anger and passion in my writing. In its serialized version online, these last four books had garnered 811,000 downloads and an 8.96 out of 10 reader rating. My highest ever.

To make a long story even longer, I decided the whole thing needed a timeline in the last appendix, so I started going through each book to indicate what month/year it began and what month/year it ended. All fine until I looked at Book 3. The ending just didn’t look right. I searched through older files and, sure enough, it was missing the final three chapters! No one had noticed!

That meant another half a day of editing, revising, and trying to make this behemoth hold together. What I’m trying to say is that I have done nothing in August but edit 750,000 words so that sometime before the end of the month, I can release a second edition. Just wish me luck, okay?

Now I can pick up where I left off writing Book 10.

I took a break in the middle of writing this to join some friends at Coeur d’Alene Casino for breakfast. We had a good time, but driving out we all realized how smoky it had become. The winds shifted late yesterday afternoon and in a matter of an hour we went from clear blue skies to a gray-shrouded smoky county.

The air quality is bad enough that state road crews were off the job on US 95 where they are resurfacing from Coeur d’Alene to Moscow or thereabouts. No equipment, no trucks, and no people to be seen along the six-mile stretch that is currently being worked on. Of course, that didn’t keep county crews from coming out to oil our county road. Messy.

I’ve had a lot going through my mind lately but the bulk of it is that I shouldn’t be wasting so much time editing and should, instead, be cleaning my trailer. When the smoke clears and I decide I can go outside again, I’ll even consider mowing and trimming around my site.

The view out my window is normally bright and cheerful at 6:00 in the morning. This morning it looked like the sun hadn't even risen. It's too smoky to sit outside and smoke a cigar!

It appears at the moment like I will be in the Seattle area the first week of October and will then start south to Quartzsite, AZ for the winter. I don’t know the exact location yet, but I plan to take US 95 south to Boise, I 84 east to Twin Falls, and US 93 south through the Great Basin to Las Vegas. From there, I rejoin US 95 through Needles and on to Quartzsite.

I plan to be back at Sun Meadow the first of May and have volunteered to help for the AANR National Convention next summer. Margie said I can be the camp host. Next time, I’ll keep my big mouth shut! On the other hand, I’m really looking forward to meeting more people and doing a little something for the place that feels like home to me.

More plans and interesting things next time!