Faltering At Every Hurdle
Progress is never as rapid as we hope
When I finished the first draft of The Mortality Code in mid-September, I was still hopeful that I might get it out into the wild in time for Christmas. That hope, that expectation of myself, has gone now. I always misjudge the timing of these things at this time of year. I forget that I’m in the middle of the busiest quarter of the year for my day job, and that time and tasks compress, and that days merge into each other, and I have my biggest workload and time commitments right now.
I also forget that the editing process is fraught with the need for consistency, for significant time commitment (no point editing fragments - they’ll just stay fragments rather than becoming part of a joined-together solid whole) so that I have an overview of the story and can watch the characters’ progression through the narrative. And although I’m now finally over halfway through this first edit (although in a book of around 106k words that isn’t actually that much), I fragment myself by just about pausing after every word, every sentence, every paragraph, ever chapter; questioning its quality, doubting its validity, tempting myself with thoughts of just scrapping it all, and leaving the entire thing undone. And it requires a real physical effort to get going again, to start pushing again, to move my arrow key from one line to the next, and to regain some kind of momentum.
And then, even when all the edits are done, and I’m at least happy with what I’ve done, cover design and blurb writing take up immense swathes of time. So The Mortality Code will have to join the long list of books I’m planning to put out next year - it will be at least three at this rate. At least I can perhaps focus on re-marketing Aggie’s Art Of Happiness for anyone who wants to buy themselves (or their friends or their enemies a very long novel about AI for Christmas.
And then, of course, I ask myself why I do this (especially thinking of my previous piece on here. And yesterday, I sort of came up with an answer:
Are we fools to still dream of greatness,
To hope our voices will be heard some day?
Are we misguided to trust our thoughts to soar
Into the sky and cover the land in new bloom?
The realists will say we're no more than jesters
Whose words will run dry in the sands of war,
That we peddle impossible dreams for losers,
Who will hate us in their final disappointment.
Extremists will say we don't go far enough,
Want us to preach hate as well as love,
To say the world needs annihilation before growth,
And claim that tolerance of any kind doesn't work.
As for us, we will keep asking our questions,
Cling to the doubts of our uncertainty, this
Fear which feeds us and clothes us in anxiety.
There is no other way for us to survive all this.
R 18.11.2023 23:03The struggle continues.