After the Project

Yesterday, I sent my novel, "Dark King Rising", out to a publisher. Immediately after I hit SEND a wave of relief washed over me and inside a sense of contentment whispered, "It is done". I was riding high on the sense of accomplishment of having not only completed something, but having begun the logical next step of putting it out there for a possible audience. To quote a TV show, I felt like "King Kong on cocaine". Judge my tastes how you will. Today is different.

Today, I look with longing at a file I no longer have to open and find myself wondering about the lives of people who have never existed anywhere but in my mind. Today, I feel let down and a little broken, the first few steps into a self-imposed exile. Today, I'm depressed. From King Kong to a field mouse and the tractor's coming.

I've been told, by artists wiser and more experienced, this is not unusual. There is first the elation, then the deflation. Like Icarus you marvel at the sun and then seconds later are choking on the waves. This is the artist's life. In a way, I guess you could say, we (artists in general) spend our lives chasing that high. The knife's edge of done before the full recognition of being done sets in. The moment of marveling at Narnia before you realize you're once more in England and have to go to school.

I don't know that I'm ready to start on something else yet. Not that I don't have enough projects to keep me quite busy, but I don't feel quite closed with this one yet. As if I need a mourning period before I can fling myself fully into the next thing, the next world, the next villain, the next protagonist, the next problem. So for now, I putter. I flirt with a book (or three). I watch bad television. And I wait for the tears to pass. I have a standing appointment with friends who write this evening and will try to stir myself to the next project.

Oh, who am I kidding?

Before I typed the ominous words "THE END" on the final page of "Dark King Rising" other characters were clamoring for my attention like children when Momma has finally come home from being long away. They badly want to escape their infancy and live their lives on the page, but I've been so busy raising one, the others have simply had to wait. Now they sense THE END of their waiting, that one lucky one of them will be next. So they tug at my attention and whisper in my inner ear of things we could do together, of empires we can make and break, of adventures unstarted, and they seek to lure me onward no matter how tired I may seem. I'm almost ready to hear them. Maybe later today.



"King Kong on Cocaine" comes from an episode of CSI. :P

We are definitely raising a Geek

I am the proud co-owner of a four year old. I say co-owner because she is my niece and if I said I owned her, my brother (her dad) and my mother (her Mimi) would probably take serious issue. Ownership question aside, my niece is a geek. She probably does not know it yet, but she is just the same.

To illustrate, we are currently working on letter and word recognition. A. B. C. D. Apple. Bird. Cat. Dragon. Yes, dragon. She recognizes the word when she sees it and takes great pride in pointing out the dragons she recognizes on the Dungeons & Dragons poster I have hung on my bedroom door.

How did this come about? Simple, she was raised by geeks. My mother (her Mimi) has always encouraged targeted long-term acquisition. For her, it was Swarovski crystal and porcelain roses. My older brother collects the cartoon character Tigger from The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. My little brother has a heavy preference for video games (he was playing Tecmo Football at three). Me, I collect dragons and comic books. She's still too young for me to trust with my comic books, most of which are older than she is, and thus valuable enough for me to wait past the hamfisted stage of her development. The influences of each of us can be seen in her choices of activities:

She uses a dragon poster to practice reading and color recognition. She knows the Tigger Song word for word. She screams when she does not get a turn at Dance Dance Revolution while others are playing.

There are definitely people who would think now is a good time to cut off the geekishness at the pass through the use of the normalizing effect of television; however, in our family we watch CSI, Bones, Burn Notice, and Fringe, so I do not think that will help in any way. Besides in this day and age, I think raising a geek is something to aspire to. Now to start on her brother. He's only 8 months old, but you really should start young.