August 25, 2010

Back From Reality

I spent two weeks immersed in a wonderful, relaxing vacation. After this came two days of sitting around my house in a post-travel haze. At the beginning of the trip, I blogged about how returning to my novel reminded me what it's like to get lost in fiction. It turns out that long exposure to reality, especially the carefree vacation form of reality, also leaves me dazed and confused: "Oh, I have a novel? A blog? I'm a writer? I'm supposed to be writing something now?" So, no, I haven't really done anything since getting home, other than catching up on the many blogs I follow.

Instead of staring at the internet, I should be contemplating the Secrets Chart and deciding how I'm going to reconstruct THE EXTENT OF THE DAMAGE. Or perhaps the situation calls for moving right on to Chapter 2 and reminding myself that I actually enjoy this fiction thing.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ Sean Di Lizio chronicles the experience of participating in the International 3-Day Novel Contest.

→ K.M. Weiland shares one of my favorite pieces of writing advice: Skip The Boring Parts. (Serendipitously, I cover this topic in my upcoming Writecraft column.)

→ Dan Wilbur helps you judge a book (snarkily) by its cover with Better Book Titles. My favorites are this one and this one. (Thanks, GalleyCat!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a Gladwell fan, the "Blink" one seriously cracked me up.

Christopher Gronlund said...

Returning from vacation, a period of overtime at the day job (in my case), or even following a writer's conference, that realization of, "I have a novel I'm working on?" and all that comes with it is funny.

When working on something, it's all I think about. But a vacation, or any other time away--when i go back to a novel, it's almost like a brand new thing.

I hope a couple weeks off was great; I hope it re-energized all your writing efforts! (Now that your back to reality and remember all you're working on :) )

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