Tag: metaphor

In Health and in Sickness

These almost-gone tulips startled me with their sere beauty. A good metaphor for how I feel sometimes … almost-gone; learning to love myself in better times and worse.

The previous couple of weeks or three I sat around with a cold, fatigue, a heart scare, more fatigue. Knitting was it while I was forced to sit around. Fatigue is a thing to be borne. There’s no hurrying it. It can be calculated. Six days of sickness, 12 days of fatigue.

In between all that, I spent the day in an Emergency Department to have my heart checked. Which meant blood tests and an ultrasound on my legs to check for blood clots. Nothing eventuated. It was just a scare, that’s all, I was told. These are the kind of diagnoses meant to comfort a patient.

This patient went home, not forgetting to ask for a copy of the the blood tests. Getting that was the best part of the day. The blood results confirmed to me that my continuing semi-isolation is in a good cause. My white blood cells are still well below what’s needed to fight off disease, platelets also very low, and red blood cells only just dragging themselves into the average range.

Writing Part 2 of the Doomed? Trilogy …

This knit-metaphor illustrates where I now am in Meld–modeled in this way I can see a few changes need to happen

… is my daily grind. I’m laboring somewhere in the middle of the middle book, writing and rewriting the same chapter. It’s new, recently inserted. Zebe, seeking revenge for her twin sister’s misfortune, needs more time than the main plot can spare to put her conspiracy into place. Hence, her own POV chapter.

But will she/won’t she achieve her goal? I’m finding that the original problem will not go away. Zebe’s sub-plot is too strenuous and intricate in its early stages to seamlessly be integrated into the main plot immediately before its stated take-off.

All it needs, you will be saying, is for the one plot-line to be stretched and the other to be shrunk until there is integration. That’s a paper and pencil task. I’ll keep you posted.

My second concern is that Meld is far stranger than Mongrel. A large party of alien ladies must be accommodated in Meld–Tardi Malko, protagonist extraordinaire, is the one in the picture to carry them–at the same time that he lives his life?

Because, while the alien ladies impinge on TM’s life big time, there are other things going on in it. How to do them justice, I’m wondering.

Then I wonder whether I’m being too optimistic? That I’m trying to stuff too much into the novel? I’ve already moved the end of Meld to the beginning of Part 3, Morph, where it might work better.

I feel like I’m having to learn to write again. My normal prose seems not strong enough to carry the weight of meaning the characters in this book will need to carry. So far this weekend, I’ve been re-reading How-To books such as Writing 21st Century Fiction by Donald Maass.