It never rains…

Well, for a while there, I’d been meaning to get back to my second spec novel which is in progress.  I’ve been doing a major rethink of the plot, coming up with some new ideas for tightening the focus and trimming some extraneous or awkward elements, and I’d been hoping to get some progress done on completing a new outline, reworking what I have, and hopefully finally putting a climax on the thing.  I worked out a fair amount of the revisions I wanted while driving to and from Comic-Con.

But while I was at Comic-Con, a couple of business opportunities came along, and those have taken priority for the past few weeks (has it been three weeks already?).  There’s one prospect I don’t feel ready to talk about yet that’s been preoccupying me, since it’s in an area I don’t know much about and I’ve kind of been immersing myself in finding out about it.  Because of my tendency to fixate on one thing at a time, that’s kept me from making progress on the other thing that arose from my trip.  Namely, an editor colleague has expressed a willingness to take a look at my spec novel proposals, and since the second one is so up in the air, that leaves the first one.  But I just recently had a new insight about that spec novel which I think will strenghten it considerably — not something that requires heavy rewriting, since it’s more a tweak to the backstory and worldbuilding that will give it greater conceptual unity.  And I’d just about succeeded in wrenching my attention away from the other thing and was ready to start work on getting the spec novel ready…

…when I got the copyedits for Star Trek DTI: Watching the Clock.  So right now, that has to be my priority.

Oh, well.  I have over two and a half weeks to get that done, and hopefully it shouldn’t take too long.  So maybe I’ll manage to work on both that and the spec novel simultaneously.  Or at least get the copyedits done within a few days and then shift gears to the spec novel.

I really should try to get back into the groove I was in last year, when I churned out several new short stories in quick succession and managed to sell several of them.  I’ve let myself lose focus since then.  Granted, going through my father’s illness and passing in recent months, and my subsequent travels to visit family and friends and keep myself occupied, have been a pretty understandable reason for losing focus.  And thanks to what my father left me, at least I’m financially comfortable enough for the moment that I can afford to take my time getting these things done.  Still, I’d just really like to finish up these spec novels, and I keep failing to get around to it.  Plus I’ve been wanting to write some more short stories.   I don’t have specific ideas for any at the moment, besides a half-formed idea for a third Hub story, but that’s why I need to apply myself to the effort.

But anyway, DTI comes first.  Maybe working on the copyedits will give me a chance to continue with another project I’ve had on hold forever, namely the annotations page for the novel.  That won’t go up on my site until the book comes out next May, of course, but I’d like to get it done before I forget too much about the writing process.