...and the inevitable crash.

[finncullen]

Dammit.

Yesterday's superabundance of energy and motivation has crashed hard.  The lack of sleep I had on Saturday night coupled with another late night yesterday have combined in a nasty pincer movement to knock me for six (that is a cricketing metaphor, what can I say?  My British roots are showing.  I'll be taking afternoon tea next) and I barely managed to drive to work before sitting numbly at my desk wondering what the black symbols on the screen in front of me meant.

Bah.

Still, caffeine helps of course and the disruption in our office (we are having new windows installed and some other building work done) is giving Finn scope for ample amusement and stimulation, not to mention allowing the lack of focus to go unnoticed.   In the meantime I shall continue to provide my clients with astonishing levels of professional advice (on autopilot, honestly I sometimes think I could do the job in my sleep) and get some roleplaying done.

As an additional update I did some more work on Tam Lin last week and estimate I have about half of it done now.   I love the story and hate it in equal measure now, but I'm damned if I will give up before it is done.   Though I am half tempted to let the faerie queen keep him after all given how much he has been annoying me of late.  Janet deserves better anyway.

Comments

[newsboyhat.livejournal.com]

Noooooo! No hating!

[my_daroga]

Ah, I'm sorry to hear about that, Finn. Work getting in the way of important things, like sleep and rp and whatnot.

I'd like to hear more about this Tam Lin project. My only exposure has been through Diana Wynne Jones's novel Fire and Hemlock, and I've always meant to delve deeper.

[finncullen.livejournal.com]

Tam Lin...

I wrote a short piece for an online project on poetry a while back (at the infamous HOL) - an extract from a fictitious book of poems. As part of this extract I included an "excerpt" of a poetic version of the legend of Tam Lin; just a few stanzas from the end of the tale, each stanza being in Elizabethan sonnet form.

Annoyingly I was quite pleased with the result and decided I should write the whole thing, it being a story I enjoy and a form I find pleasant to use. Since then it's twisted and turned through a variety of incarnations and permutations, writes and rewrites that is quite at odds with my usual fire-and-forget way of writing.

It seems I want this piece to actually be good. And as a result it is eating my brain and my time, and I doubt that I will now ever be happy with any single finished version of it, which leaves me feeling somewhat trapped.

When it is finally complete I will probably post it here (and almost certainly at Storyforge) and there are even rumours of an audio version somewhere down the line...

[my_daroga]

Oh, I relate so much. Most everything I write is a "first draft"--that is to say, very little changes from the time I first put it down on the screen. This isn't to say "how very talented I am!" but merely to indicate that I've never really learned to edit, and would probably benefit from it. At least, my writing would. I have a rather longer work sitting on my computer that I desperately want to get "out there," and yet cannot bring myself to 1) post unedited 2) actually get down to editing. It's so intimidating.

I don't know what to tell you about never feeling happily finished with it, though. At some point, you need to let go--I don't think anyone who feels passionately about their work ever feels like it's truly complete. Unless they have a self-confidence I can't begin to imagine.