My official weekend is going to be Friday and Saturday. In part, I am doing this to keep pace with Holly over at WABWM while I am participating in that. In part, I just like it. I don’t much care for Sundays, so I might as well work on them.
Unfortunately, this plan does not mesh too well with what I have to get done this weekend. We’ve got a horse show (I can’t seem to get a break from them…) Saturday and Sunday. Early mornings and long, tedious hours times two. As fall wears on, we’ll start into the year-end finals. From last year to this year, we retired our old show horse, so now our up-and-coming mare has to do it all. Should be exciting, if not necessarily successful.
I keep promising a Sunday column and I swear, it will happen. But I can’t seem to get a grip on the idea. It keeps drifting off the focus that I want. I’m going for food, I’m going for romance, I’m going for small cast, I’m going for slice of life drama or comedy, basically in that order of importance.
But fantasy keeps hanging me up. I know myself and I know that there is a good chance that I will not enjoy playing in a world with no fantasy element. But every time I try to figure out what would work with the rest of my goals, I get derailed. I had an idea to do something with hungry ghosts. It came to a whole lot of nothing. I have vague notions of doing something inspired by Brian Jacques’ Redwall and the Chronicles of Narnia (I have been on a children’s literature kick for a month or two). But not for the Sunday column.
The whole concept seems to just drift away from me every time. I am beginning to think that the core idea is flawed. I want to do a serial fiction column. (I would dearly love to one day be listed on the Web Fiction Guide.) I would like it to be linked short stories, rather than a novel in pieces, so that I can edit each story to stand on its own. Having written, if not truly completed, novels, I know how much the story ends up changing as I write it. I can’t abide the notion of putting out parts of a novel while it is still being written. Short stories seem the solution. And the food link, which I like in and of itself, would be a way of making them feel like parts of a whole.
Maybe three’s company and I have to toss the fantasy or the food. Maybe I’m nervous to try something so new and ambitious (for me, at any rate) and am unconsciously sabotaging the idea. Maybe I’m a great, yowling hack.
This, I suppose, is what weekends are for. I’ll figure something out.