More distractions
Good thing I have that rug on the loom. I can go pound it for a few picks to empty out some frustration. Not exactly writer's block, because I know what I want to be writing. The problem is too many threads at once, and (unusual for me) I'm having trouble focusing on one at a time.
There's also a need to get into the head of a real villain, since he's writing a journal that will be found and read later so the content is visible to the reader. This is not easy for me at all.
I know I can do this thing. Progress is slow, though, and things are not coming out in the order in which they will finally be presented to the reader. That's why I haven't been uploading anything much yet.
There are fiddly details too. Probably don't matter to many readers, but they do to me. For instance, dates. OK, it all happens in the city of Chatton, so we can assume chronology based from the supposed "founding" of the city, three or four centuries earlier. But there are two timestreams, separated by somewhat more than a century. The lunar calendar in use has been "reformed" in the intervening century. This is part of the actual plotline, but it necessitates two dating systems. The old system used an intercalary month just before the spring equinox to adjust new moons to the solar seasons. This month was a second Wolf Moon, so in years when it was used, the Wolf Moons were designated as First Wolf and Second Wolf. The new system eliminated the intercalary month for political and social reasons, and switched to an intercalary period of varying length, inserted every year after the fall equinox, and called "The Stag's Leap." This is a festival time treated as a holiday outside of any regular month or week and featuring celebrations to cross between and level the economic and social classes of the city. It runs from 16-18 days, depending on the lunar cycle in the given year, and has no weekdays at all. So if the last day of the Harvest Moon was a Sunday, the first day of the Beaver Moon is a Monday, and the festival between them is literally "outside" calendar time.
This may all seem like pointless detail, but since we have characters who believe they are transformed into wolves at the full of the moon, the lunar cycles matter quite a lot. The murders in the earlier timestream took place during the double wolf moons, while the crimes in the second timestream happen during Stag's Leap.
Anyway, I find myself getting bogged down in calculating this calendar stuff, which slows the actual writing. I suppose I should just stick in dummy dates and work them out later, but I'm afraid of messing up some key detail that way.
Perfectionism is sometimes a curse.
There's also a need to get into the head of a real villain, since he's writing a journal that will be found and read later so the content is visible to the reader. This is not easy for me at all.
I know I can do this thing. Progress is slow, though, and things are not coming out in the order in which they will finally be presented to the reader. That's why I haven't been uploading anything much yet.
There are fiddly details too. Probably don't matter to many readers, but they do to me. For instance, dates. OK, it all happens in the city of Chatton, so we can assume chronology based from the supposed "founding" of the city, three or four centuries earlier. But there are two timestreams, separated by somewhat more than a century. The lunar calendar in use has been "reformed" in the intervening century. This is part of the actual plotline, but it necessitates two dating systems. The old system used an intercalary month just before the spring equinox to adjust new moons to the solar seasons. This month was a second Wolf Moon, so in years when it was used, the Wolf Moons were designated as First Wolf and Second Wolf. The new system eliminated the intercalary month for political and social reasons, and switched to an intercalary period of varying length, inserted every year after the fall equinox, and called "The Stag's Leap." This is a festival time treated as a holiday outside of any regular month or week and featuring celebrations to cross between and level the economic and social classes of the city. It runs from 16-18 days, depending on the lunar cycle in the given year, and has no weekdays at all. So if the last day of the Harvest Moon was a Sunday, the first day of the Beaver Moon is a Monday, and the festival between them is literally "outside" calendar time.
This may all seem like pointless detail, but since we have characters who believe they are transformed into wolves at the full of the moon, the lunar cycles matter quite a lot. The murders in the earlier timestream took place during the double wolf moons, while the crimes in the second timestream happen during Stag's Leap.
Anyway, I find myself getting bogged down in calculating this calendar stuff, which slows the actual writing. I suppose I should just stick in dummy dates and work them out later, but I'm afraid of messing up some key detail that way.
Perfectionism is sometimes a curse.