How I'm Going - Personal Post

I'm just going... no questions, very comfortable, taking it easy. Why? should I be upset?

It is one thing to want an uncomplicated life, another to eschew complications.

What's strangest to me, is that since I gave up coffee, I don't feel the kind of wild restlessness I have called motivation anymore. Certainly I feel anxious and then tired, which are the normal cycles of the adrenelain system playing themselves out. But at the same time I simply don't have the sharp, bitter, piercing sense of I MUST GO NOW. Go figure.

My appetite is extremely subdued... I eat once a day at the moment, unless I have fruit about... other than fruit I simply have little interest in eating food otherwise. I get carbo cravings once a day, eat pasta or dahl, and they go. It is a strange thing.

The weather has changed in my little sector of the universe... the planet has wobbled back into summertime, and a ferocious UV heat bangs down, accompanied by a restless and agitating wind... I find myself reluctant to go out. Outside I dry up. I go into that kind of heat feeling as if I am about to be evaporated.

I will have to go out today simply to do administrative things. Australia has an election on Saturday and I must ring the electoral commission to discover if I can register to vote here in this place far from my home, since I am registered to a faraway place for voting.

I have no hat, and no inclination to spend the money to buy one. This, unfortunately, means it is not time to buy a hat, and I will burn.

I have surrendered coffee for life, without reservation, and it is very strange. Very strange indeed. I had depended on that drug for, well, for stimulation and bigger ups and downs. Life seemed more intense.

I want what's real, however. I want what's actual, experiential, and there now, and i want it on its own terms. That is to say, I want it unconditionally.

For the readers at my yahoo group, Return To Gaia has altered somewhat its conception, and I would like to briefly talk about it here before finishing.

I re-envisioned Gaia as a series of interlocking short stories, in order to best accomodate the episodic, global and non-sequential nature of the story. The challenge with this is that it requires significantly more work to create, for instance, in book two a story about the genetic transformation of the Chinese into the borg-style Families in book two. No problem so far.

Then I have allowed myself to react and be influenced by the screenwriting and plot-structuring software I have recently got. This is good, but not good enough. The plot is not visual enough, and could easily be much much more so. But I find myself hampered by the difficulties of learning the new software as well as the challenge of structuring the plot. So I have stopped.

The best option I think is to do a visual outline on a scene by scene basis in outline mode on Word, doing a top down design of the entire plot of the first story of return to Gaia and a broad stroke design of the rest. This is to create containers, mentally and physically, for the ideas that inevitably will crop up.

The main thrust of all this rethinking and reworking is that the information (read below) on creating a successful sci-fi career, rests very much on short stories. And I want to get published in Asimov's Magazine with the first Gaia story, so it has to be simply remarkable.

I am not very experienced in the target market, even though I have a very clear idea of the (now former) head editor Gardner Dozois' idea of the Best through his yearly anthologies. I am tempted to charge straight in and write it simply from start to finish but I don't want to do a shibboleth.

"You only have research after you don't need it anymore."

TOO TRUE! Clearly I need to write it, all five to ten thousand words, and then research it appropriately for the market.

That's my personal stuff for the moment.