
Half because “reflect” was the micro.blog photo blogging prompt word, and half channeling dmych, I grabbed this while waiting for the bus on the way home from Esperanto. 📷 #mbfeb
Half because “reflect” was the micro.blog photo blogging prompt word, and half channeling dmych, I grabbed this while waiting for the bus on the way home from Esperanto. 📷 #mbfeb
Started raining while I was in the bank, but my flat cap did the trick. Now luxuriating with a Divine Hammer DIPA while I wait for the other Esperantists to arrive.
Reading @ChrisMcDougall’s Running with Sherman and drinking the @BlindPigBrewery Dark Mild while I wait for my Esperanto group to arrive. Beer not bitter enough for @limako, but I like it. Book not bitter at all
Dum mi atendas la aliajn grupanoj, mi trinkas la bieron Norwegian Farmhouse IPA: hordeo, tritiko, sekalo, kaj aveno, kun Citra kaj Amarilla lupoloj. / “Young, fresh, hazy, and thirst quenching!” @BlindPigBrewing
Dum mi atendas la aliajn Esperantistojn, mi trinkas @blindpigbrewing’s Soft Landing (Mola Surterigo aŭ tiuokaze Mola Surlunigo) / drinking a tribute to the moon landing! #Esperanto
Ni trinkas Taste the Rainbow duoblan IPAon. @BlindPigBrewing
I have a brother who teases me almost, but not quite, mercilessly / Mi havas fraton, kiu pikmokas min preskaŭ, sed ne tute, senkompate.
I’m back to work on my novel, and my brother gets some of the credit, for pointing out something that I had not considered.
Last summer, I was feeling especially good. I was feeling fit, both mentally and physically, and enjoying life. I noticed that, the more time I spent outdoors, the better I felt. I had a lot of guesses about what might have been going on. Maybe I was feeling better because I was getting:
I was inclined to credit the extra vitamin D (which probably helps mood). I have gone so far as to get my doctor to order a vitamin D test along with the other blood tests for my annual physical. (We’ll see how my vitamin D levels held up over the long dark winter. If the results are interesting, I’ll post them.)
I was describing all this to my brother, who said, “I think you were feeling great during high summer because you had made plans and you were executing on them. You made a plan to walk the rail trail and did that, and then made a plan to go to France (for the Esperanto conference) and did that too.”
That sounded very reasonable.
Steven, of course, had his own idea about what I might next plan and then execute (“I think you should make a plan to write an essay for the Belartaj Konkursoj”), but I knew that the most important thing to work on is my novel.
So, I’m back to work on it. Starting with a plan.
In its broadest outline, my plan is simple.
I had stalled out because I’d realized that I’d gotten the end of my novel wrong. So, I’ll fix that.
I’ll spend a couple of hours brainstorming the ideal ending of a novel along the lines of the one I’ve written, and then I’ll write the ending to that novel.
Then I can back up and rewrite the beginning so that it leads the ending I’ve come up with.
I’ve known this would be what I’d have to do for a long time. It seemed daunting six months ago, because I’d just rewritten the first part, and the idea of doing it again seemed excruciating. But now, I think I can face it.
I’m more than a little excited about writing the ending from scratch. I’ve got lots of stuff to work with—heroes I like, menacing characters for them to deal with, danger, complexity.
And, if I don’t remember all the details about exactly who was menacing in which way or why, that’s entirely okay. I’ll figure out just what sort of menacing most suites the ending I come up with. Then I can go back and diddle around with the menacing in the middle and at the beginning to make it match.
It’s got all the excitement of starting work on a new novel, with just a quarter of the work!