Does anyone get so frustrated in doing your work you just want to repeatedly just bang your head against the desk in front of you?  I suppose I should say “virtual desk” since its hard to reach mine with all the papers spread out everywhere.  I know, I know I should really clean it up, but then how would I find what I’m looking for?  Take the memory stick panic not too long ago causing me to go out and buy another after I found it so I could do back-up behind the back-up.  Chaos = sanity to my I suppose.  

Life and work don’t like to mix a lot and as things go they tend to interfere with one another quite a bit.  It’s that extra little bite in the tushy.  I can’t just sit in my office, or on the bed, couch, floor, anyplace I find to get work done, and attempt to do everything at once like some sort of obsessive person.  Trust me, it happens and when it does any disruption summons the most evil of beings that would quite easily send you into the pit of Mount Doom.  Honestly I do get my best work done while in obsessive mode, but what becomes of life and reality?  Doesn’t there need to be both to really function as an author?  If not then why am I here?  Why am I interacting?  Wait, why am I here and not working?  Technically I am, I’m just staring at the somewhat organized outline I attempted to make (thanks to the suggestion of a great fantasy writer friend of mine Charles Yallowitz who is much more organized than I am and it shows; click on his name and check him out if you haven’t already), combining it with my historical outline and doing my best to make them overlap.  That’s the joy and pain of research.  I love doing such a thing and maybe I get a little in too deep and can’t pull myself out.  I feel the need to make things somewhat historically accurate while I slide that fiction right in there.  It gives the story a more sense of realism or more of a “hmmm, you never know do you?” kind of feeling.

We know my love for mythology and now you know my intrigue in history, although to be honest I am a tad snobby when it comes to any time after the colonization of the USA (Including all the wars that happened after) and I could care less.  Ancient History, World History, Theoretical History……that’s where my heart lies.  Combine that with my love for vampires and the supernatural would you doubt I would try my best to combine the two?

So Tessa’s journey countinues as time goes by and as I see the end of that tunnel I pause.  I truly pause.  I want to go further, I need to go further but that thing called Life screams at me.  So much change, so many responsibilities, and so much mixed emotions it is really hard to harness them.  Of course none of them coincide with where I’m at in the book.  That would make things too easy.  I get deeply rooted into what I write and I take on the role of each character that is important at the time so I can look down the barrel of the gun so to speak.  If I can’t feel anything or BE that person/vampire then how are my readers supposed to?  Its probably why I get so much mail on the exact subject.  I want just as much of a connection with my characters as people had with the first one.  I’m not saying I’m a best selling author, or any better than anybody else, because I’m not.  I feel and I write, both to an extreme.  I gave up on a deadline for that exact reason.  I’m letting the Beta readers help tremendously and will figure out what to do after the first draft is done, because we know that is the most raw of any form of writing.  There are times when I wish that maybe I should stick to smaller bits of work, but the story is so tremendous that even the trilogy is hard to break up as it is.  It’s a story that I’ve know the ending since the beginning, or at least an inkling.  All that middle stuff just has to be fleshed out and written.  Remember in school when the math teachers made you write out HOW you came to the answer you just knew to be correct, but it was much harder to do exactly that?  Yep, its a lot like that.  I know the answer, the formula is much harder to explain.

So as I toddle between my work and my life I wish for my helper, or someone of the same caliber because it was just the push I needed.  We can’t always be that lucky.  For now as the afternoon begins I will sit here in my hoodie under a blanket, sipping cup after cup of pumpkin flavored coffee in my nicely heated mug and stare between pages and enjoy the solitude.  Looking out my window I see the leaves  begin to turn and the cars pass by while the birds in distance speak to one another and in the background the snoring of Ares, who deserves to relax as much as he wants through the day because I’d rather a healthy dog than the one that was sick not too long ago.  Responsibility comes soon enough and won’t wane until 11 tonight.  Back to work I will go and hopefully, just hopefully, I can stop hitting that head on the desk and focus.

I so need a social life or a complete solitary one to kick start things into gear.