Stephen King recommends stepping away from your first draft for at least six weeks. And in the meantime, go write something else. At least until you forget about the first thing. So that when you come back to it, it is an alien thing, and something to whose parts you have little emotional attachment, should you need to alter or remove them.

Would this be the best route for me?

I worry that if I step away,

“Brain. I need a word to describe darkness.”

“What quality would you like to modify?”

“It’s night, and there are no stars, so how about just ‘really dark?’ So, intensity.”

“Would you like a modifier of the same category of contextually-determined primary-quality as ‘darkness?’ Or would you rather something of a different primary quality?”

I find myself wanting to know where I’m going before I write. But, “You do know. Your right side is doing its thing. You just can’t tell what it’s doing until you write it.”

Just keep writing. Trust whatever comes to mind at the time (MAKE SURE MY RIGHT SIDE HAS BEEN ENLIVENED?). Distrust looking too far ahead—coming up with specifics or links (?) before actually getting to those points (contra intuits/feelings that encompass potential links without involving specifics). That’s utilizing the left too early, I imagine.

I am super eager to wrap up the first draft, to conclude all things, and it dawned on me that perhaps things aren’t ready to conclude. And perhaps me trying to do so is premature. Is there some merit to “letting the story dictate when it ends?” I know that sometime boundaries benefit creation. But at the same time, I went over the page limit a whole bunch when I wrote for class. I cut it back during editing. But it was fairly common to write over until I got to that point where it just felt finished.

Schol! Whatever that means.

Is it a joy to write?

Joy joy joy joy.

Yoj.

Yooooj. Yojoy. Joyoj. Joyoi. Oi oi oi!

I have forgotten the reason, or reasons, to write. I have forgotten them, or they have been displaced.

I now seek to win the tournament. Snap kick him in the neck. Go for the cut eyelid. Drive yourself until you bleed sweat.

The scoreboard drives you: How are you doing now? What about now? Not good enough… Still not good enough… What about now? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with this game?

Madeleine L’Engle says to serve the work first and then serve the audience. One does not serve himself. I would prepend this with “serve God.”

Don’t want to write? This is the work that God has given to you. Serve God. Serve the work. Serve those who will read it. Serve with all the effort and intelligence and stubbornness you have.

I read a compliment someone gave a friend of mine’s piece.

I need to nuance my understanding of the purpose of clustering. We learned it for random vignettes, but this is not its only usage. This was merely a tool to learn the process and to practice it.

Because the right brain does not order or sequence or define, because it seeks to explore, to make new connections—to join numerous sprigs into some unknown end, it seems to work best without any agenda in place—any known end. Else, you are sequencing, defining, ordering things to fit an agenda,

I started developing a city that began as something like Mos Eisely and ended up a sister city of the telan capital, Im. Since my characters entered the city by walking, this brought to mind just how far they had to walk between being “out” of the city and “in.” If I were walking into Houston, this would take days. If Dallas, less, but still a while. And in both cases, the line between “in” and “out” is quite blurry.

I just ran across a blog that says that Constantinople had 500,000 people in it during its height. I wonder what Rome had. Or Athens.

I know Tolkien didn’t allegorize. But I can’t help but see a metaphor here. It’s probably just me, but hey.

The Hobbits are us. In particular, they are us who don’t know or care to know about the wider world, the world outside of our little culture’s scope—the world of Lewis prior to Mythopoeia. Ted Sandyman is the hobbit par excellence, and even the more pleasant ones want nothing to do with news of Mordor and of Dwarves and Elves and adventures and magic. They just want to eat and drink and party,