Newsletter - August 2, 2022

Thanks to the generosity of friends who supplied us with a place to stay, my family spent a day at the beach this weekend. Most of us are properly sunburned... meanwhile, a few more of our backyard plants took our leave of absence as an opportunity to "walk into the light." No fun deed goes unpunished.

My social media efforts are on life-support only at this point. I'm still planning to participate in the Books-n-Brews event this coming weekend, but I'm otherwise spending most of my time escorting work projects out the door. I'm not sure it's the right move, because I'm not convinced my spending more time on work actually gets it done faster.

I've written about ten chapters in my new book, but I keep going back to shore up the world, so the story is sluggishly crawling forward. I know this is the way I build up from nothing in the early phase of creating a new world, but my work-addled brain is running even a tad slower than normal. Part of my struggle is the first person perspective--how do I write about another world, from the perspective of that person, when they've never been to Earth (at that point in time). They don't have common points of reference--bears and badgers, pines and birch, so how do I populate the world? Try describing a wolf versus the time it takes to refer to a wolf (because we all know what a wolf is), and then compound that for every creature you'd desire to inhabit your world. I'm sure there's books about how to tackle these problems, but at least for now, I want to fumble my way forward and learn from it. I do have an option for a bit of a cheat that will supply some commonality between the inappropriately named AllForest and Earth.

o To-Do list for writing last week: