A few weeks back I finally spent time with the Burrito (my niece) again, and the whole experience was wonderful. I ended up with material for the next Christmas chapbook, just not as I wildly imagined it (actively collaborating with the Burrito, who recently won an award for a poem she wrote, by the way). The Burrito has a younger brother and sister these days. Liz & Pepe, as I'm currently imagining the title (and see no reason to consider changing it), is named after my youngest niece (and goddaughter!) and her grandfather, my dad (Pepe is French for grandfather).
I also cooked up another potential novel-length concept, Whitman. Haven't yet started writing again, but I keep reminding myself that only a few months ago I finished In the Leviathan, and until the Vella era I typically took much longer breaks between long projects. I also have Don't Throw Baby Out with the Bathwater, technically a professional development project, that I'll be writing, hoping to publish it via Kindle for a particularly professional result (these tend to end up being three-ring binders when they're done by others).
I kept telling myself, before the trip, wait on the trip to begin working on Children's Crusade. And here we are weeks later and I still haven't. Yesterday was the start of a four-day weekend for Memorial Day, so I certainly have plenty of time to work on writing (which I count these trips to the library, when I do the bulk of my blogging efforts these days, as part of, hoping next, as in right after this, to tackle a sequel to Dead Butlers, the scripting exercise that led to Nine Panel Grid). (As I write this, I'm seriously considering making it a prose effort and not another script.) (Anyway, just a relatively minor writing effort, keeping the juices flowing.)
All this and gamely plugging Event Fatigue on Twitter occasionally, hoping some schmo will help spark interest in it. When I think about how far I am from even a figment of someone's imagination of the traditional publishing life, I sometimes regret that. But getting to write exactly what I want ain't so bad, either. It led to Leviathan, which could conceivably change all this. Who knows? Stranger things have happened.
EDIT: Wrote the "Man in the Box" thing, in comic book script format. You can read it here.
