What's Goin' On

Although I've done a bit of an update over at the Mango, I haven't done it in a while over here. Many of you know that I work seven days a week, with my time divvied up amongst two corporations. So the work I want to do happens at about the pace of digging a prison escape tunnel with a wooden spoon that I stole from the Italian ice guy. (It was nice of him to visit the prison.)

I still, still, still have fifteen regular episodes of Beware the Hairy Mango to go and two episodes of Beware the Donated Mango before I'm done with that forever. I've got decent chunks of every script written, and will put the shows out as I finish them.

I've pulled out a story I've been puttering around in for years with a working title of Red and Roxanne. It's weird, interpersonal, artsy science fiction story that still has to have some cliches extracted, and it may be another year before it's finished. For a couple three days in my meager amount of spare time I'm trying to fix some horrendous formatting issues. Last year Scrivener was on sale, so I gave it a try, using Red and Roxanne as the guinea pig. I got the scenes laid out and worked on it to a degree, when my little netbook choked on it and couldn't move. So that was the end of that.

I reopened the file yesterday and I'm slowly cutting and pasting its several thousand words section by section back into a Word document. Slowly, because the formatting is so fucked up there are different issues with each scene. I'm talking margins, tab settings, fonts, spacing, numbered lists where there should be none, all sorts of shit. And neither Word nor AbiWord will let me select the entire document and fix the formatting across the whole. What a waste of precious life.

Once that bullshit is done I'll have had a few days to recharge my Mango batteries and can get to work on putting more episodes out. What I'm shooting for is to wrap up the podcast so I can get more fiction done. I've got at least five short stories in various stages and a novel rewrite I'm looking forward to getting back to.

I'm going to try to do one draft of all of them before starting on the next set of drafts. I'm hoping that taking that much time between drafts on any one story will give it time to develop in my head, and give me some distance so I can make it better. My name is Matt and I suffer from what Bud Sparhawk calls Premature Submission Syndrome. I get so eager! But I must control myself.

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