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.
It always makes me smile to hear about the Burrito. I'm very happy you got to see her and that it went so well. And two more, to boot. Your writing is at a different level than mine and so I don't know that I could offer you any advice you haven't heard or don't know but to quote Fibber McGee you have to follow the moose.
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