Liminal Zone Day 3 - Pleasure Is My Business

I had an essay written on how it's important to respect vacation time when you're a writer with a day job. In summary: I've tried writing on weekends and vacations and I've tried writing on workdays and leaving vacations as vacations. Neither is really satisfactory for the writer with a day job. However, no matter how you schedule things, one thing a writer needs is time to stare off into space. And sleep. Sleep is good.

Staring off into space, though, is serious business, and I did a bunch of it today. What was accomplished? I got a lot of questions down about the holes in the backstory and identified a few opportunities there. I got a tentative dare schedule for the first six months of the year (though I have to ponder this before I post it).

The big thing I had to think about, though, was voice. I'm still working on the voice of this novel and how it will begin. The past two months was about scenes and characters. The next pass, though, will certainly be about voice and pacing. And I still need to work on how to open the book. I think I will write a longer post about beginnings - in particular about a particular tone of opening that loses me every time (and which, unfortunately, seems to be used a lot in cozies and romances) and how two techniques I see in more hard-boiled novels would have worked better for those same stories.

In the mean time, I baked cookies (peanut blossoms) and watched the Marx Brothers' Animal Crackers tonight. So as Captain Spaulding says:

Hello, I must be going.
I'm here to say I cannot stay
I must be going.
I'm glad I came, but all the same
I must be going.
I really must be going....