Progress report: finally moving forward again

Wow, it was a serious pain in the neck getting really started on something — anything — after June 15th, when I finally sent No Foreign Sky back to my agent.

Those puppies were (and are) taking up a certain amount of my time, and by “a certain amount,” I mean “a lot.” Also, getting up at 1:00 AM every night to make Morgan nurse her puppies was causing me to take a lot of naps in the afternoon, which is the low-energy period of the day for me anyway. This is true even though the puppies nurse in like five minutes flat. Maybe ten max. Very different from nursing all the time when they were newborns.

Anyway, stuff I have been working on, a little: Tasmakat. Since stuff in the Tuyo world is easier for me to work on than anything else, that’s what I worked on. Even that was slow. (For stuff in this world, very slow.) However, I now have chapters one, two, and probably five written. Chapter five was fun to write; that’s why I wrote it out of order.

I also have been poking at a story from Thaddeus’ pov for the next Black Dog collection. I know in broad terms what ought to happen in that story, and for various reasons I think it would be good to write that story, but I then set it aside in the hope that specific scenes will just occur to me one of these days. Preferably in the next month or so.

Instead, last night, a different story for this collection started to work itself out in my head. It is the first (and will be the only) story told from Grayson’s point of view. I can’t tell you much about it. Almost all of the events in this story depend on the events in a different story in the same collection. So I can say, “Grayson and Martya deal with the poroniec demon,” but that is obviously meaningless to you at this time. I can say, this will be the last story in the collection. I think it obviously makes sense to leave a Grayson pov story till the end.

It was nice to start moving forward with something I think I can finish in a week or two … or three, considering the puppies are only going to get cuter for some time yet … anyway, with luck this will be a fairly quick story to write. I’ll be aiming for sixty to eighty pages, which is about the length I prefer.

Placing all five puppies in new homes would clear the distraction out of my home. Morgan sure wouldn’t mind, as far as I can tell. However, I have to say, these tricolor girl puppies are very, very appealing. I’m really positive they are going to have pretty heads. I especially like Tricolor Girl One.

Also, Naamah has become extremely focused on playing with puppies, since no other dog in the household is remotely as playful as she is. Morgan used to be and may be again, but not right now. So Naamah has taught herself to play very gently with the infants. She is quite safe to leave with them while I go on about other things. But she is dying to play tag and wrestle. She flings herself energetically onto her back to try to get them to jump on her, but they are still at the pounce-and-fall-over stage. But, what I’m saying is, plainly it would be kinder to Naamah to keep a puppy …