Watching my lazy, long-haired cat make one of his lacksidaisical periodic attempts to groom himself is pretty hilarious.
Feeling pretty disgruntled today. No good reasons, but sometimes you don't need one. Maybe it's just because I woke up from nightmares about buying a house full of swarming earthworms. *shudders* Just a couple nights ago, I had a dream about a giant demi-god eel. Oh, yes, it's been a barrel of monkeys in my head as of late.
AKB is slowly rolling its way around to its end and, though it still occasionally gives me a panicky pang in my gut to finish something I've been working on so long (and that still has such potential), I'm feeling pretty good about it. Mostly things are falling the way I wanted them to, the way I envisioned them all this time, and that feels good. Mostly, the reactions are just what I hoped for, and that feels good too. And I've enjoyed the conversations it's inspired, the way it's made me think about what I'm doing inside and outside the story.
Appetite, on the other hand, feels like a source of such huge frustrations. My love for the story is so deep and incredible. It's been just about a year since I started writing it and it's still so incredibly present in my life. The obsession isn't quite as deep as that with AKB, but it's close.
And it's hard to say whether it's hard to find the words because I'm not as invested or whether I'm not as invested because the words are so grudging to come...but either way, the words are not coming and a month that I was theoretically supposed to be devoting to Appetite is...not working out that way.
More than that, I don't have a good feel for what's not working. I mean...a lot of times when I feel like I'm veering off course, I can take a good, hard look at it and at least come up with a hypothesis (generally correct) about what to do. And this time, I have no feel for it. It looks good on paper, it looks good to my advisory committee and the only advice that I--or anyone else--can come up with is to just keep forging forward. But that requires words. And words are what I most emphatically do not have.
But the alternative is to accept (temporary) defeat. To stop trying to squeeze these words out and move on to something else, something not so hard. And...I'm not quite ready to do that, either.
Maybe I'm just spinning wheels waiting for my
yuletide assignment to magically appear in my inbox.