Progress

Yes, I’ve been making some. :-)

Granted, a lot of my progress can’t be seen, but it’s still something. I’ve been keeping up with my page a day, I’ve been working simultaneously on a couple of poems, and I’ve been editing Driving Into Forever. This is where we run into the progress that’s hard to see. Do I count pages? words I’ve changed? I’ve had to add a green pen to the red for when I make changes to my changes. :-)

I’ve made a couple of false starts on the Summer Challenge . . . Now that I’ve made up my mind to do it, I’ve got several ideas all clamouring for my attention. There’s a chorus of “pick me, pick me” going on in my head. I need to buckle down and choose one.

I’m also feeling the pull of all the reference material I’ve got in my office. Books and magazines I’ve acquired over the years with the plan to use them to generate story ideas.

I have an entire set of Man, Myth, and Magic, both in their original magazine format and in a hardbound format. Why do I have both? I like the hard backs for ease of locating information, but the magazines have really interesting trivia on their back covers.

For instance, there’s an article speculating on where Bram Stoker got his inspiration for Dracula. Surprisingly, the first source cited is Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who was said to have murdered over 600 young women and girls for the sheer pleasure of bathing in their blood.

Another back cover showcases Harry Houdini, and yet another quotes passages from the Book of Ezekiel in an effort to prove that he met up with men from space. These articles are not part of the hard bound editions, which is why I keep both.

I also have a handful of UNESCO Couriers, the magazine put out by the United Nations. These are thin little magazines, but they’re packed with world history and information. I just recently acquired several volumes of Horizon, a hard bound magazine of the arts. Each volume has articles on history, art, archaeology, ideas, and the world around us.

From Time-Life I have the Great Ages of Man series, the Time Frame series, the Planet Earth series, and most of the Enchanted World series. And let’s not forget the multitude of books bought through the National Geographic Society.

One of these days I might actually get around to reading them all. :-)

For now, I think I’ll just keep writing.