Multi-Tasking and Time Travel

I forgot I was blogging at Turtleduck Press today.

Part of that is the long weekend (Memorial Day here in the U.S.) and the end of the school year. Both together have thrown off my sense of time.

Part of it is how I just can’t seem to keep numbers straight in my head. One month I was absolutely certain I was to blog on the 28th and my fellow Turtleduckers had to hold me back. Nearing our fifth wedding anniversary, I argued the exact date with my husband for an hour, till I went and got our marriage certificate and found that we were both wrong.

The biggest part, though, is that my brain was elsewhere. I’m working on a final before-approvals edit of His Faithful Squire (coming August 1st; I’m so excited!), the sort-of sequel to Knight Errant, so I’ve been spending a lot of time on a luxury cruise ship in deep space far in the future. I’m also working on an excerpt from a book that took place when Taro was twelve, to post as our July free fiction offering. That book was written some fifteen years ago and the excerpt requires a lot of work and some time spent on a planet embroiled in civil war. Also, I’m writing a short story (growing into a novella, sigh) for a group challenge on Goodreads. The story is quite a stretch for me—it’s set in Italy, a place I know little about, it’s contemporary which I never write, and it’s straight (as in, the genre—the characters are gay) romance. Which I also never write.

If you’ve ever paid much attention to Tuscany, you’ll surely understand that coming back from there is quite a hardship.

So that’s my excuse. I’m busy as a perfectionist beaver and contented as a napping cat, but things like blogging, socializing, and sleeping just don’t hold my attention right now.

On the surface, it might seem strange. How is it that I can keep track of the details of two universes, the timelines and worldbuilding and characters all carefully held, the words floating around my head ready, and not remember “blog on the 30th and by the way that’s today?”

You know, when you dig deeper it seems strange too. But that’s what we writers are. Strange. I think any writer who tells you they aren’t strange is in denial, or possibly lying.

That seems rude. Let’s just go with “I’ve never met a writer who wasn’t strange, and I’ve met a lot of writers,” shall we? Most of us proclaim our strangeness proudly. We know it’s our strangeness that lets us do what we do. Could just anyone write a 249,000-word first novel just for fun and the possibility of one day getting people to read it? No. And even fewer could do that, edit it, write more, edit more…we have to be strange. We have to be strong, too, but that’s a different topic.

Writers create worlds. Surely it makes sense that all the wonder, all the weirdness, all the great wide everything of a multitude of worlds must reside inside a writer.

The simple fact is that I spend more time in my created universes than I do in the one I was born in. E.L. Doctorow wrote that writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. I agree with the sentiment—that’s how a writer looks to those who don’t hold conversations with unseen people.

I wouldn’t call it schizophrenia, though. That implies those voices aren’t real, and that just can’t be. Eve (Marcori, my Marine character) would tell me.

…wouldn’t she?