... is a critical motivation failure.

I don't know what happened. Monday I worked out a snarl in Summerdown, made good and interesting progress on Cormorant Child . . . Tuesday I woke up with nothing.

No words, no ideas, no interest.

Zip, zilch, zero, and nada.

My current best theory is that this is the meat-puppet's fault, what with the hormones and PMS and everything, but unfortunately this is one of those things where self-knowledge doesn't do me any damn good. I'm still sitting here with my inner two year old sobbing drearily, don't WANNA.

And I still have to turn in approximately 175,000 words on August first. Of which I have 37,445, in a draft that is not exactly what I want my editor to see. And while I have no official deadline or commitment for Cormorant Child, it would be REALLY SUPER to have something that, oh, around about September first, could be presented to my editor as an option novel.

(I also have a Bossycatzilla who is seriously about to be earmuffs.)

So this is where I have to suck it up and deal. Go through the motions and have faith, as in Barbara Hambly's Silicon Mage books, that the magic will come back.

Long long ago in a galaxy far far away . . .

Sorry, wrong script.

About six years ago, immediately after I (a.) got an agent and (b.) quit teaching, I wrote a novel in six weeks. It was like an erupting geyser, and I didn't need to be particularly self-aware to see the connection. I wrote it, did two revisions, gave it to my agent.

I loved this novel. I hugged it and squeezed it and called it George.

My agent was underwhelmed.

So was my editor, when I eventually had an editor.

So was my writing partner, the ever lovely and talented Bear.

I had plenty of other things to work on, so I said, Fuck you all very much, (not those words, of course, and really not even that sentiment, but Buttercup is marry Humperdinck in little less 'n half an hour, so I'm summing up, not explaining, capische?) and shoved it into a mental box (which I just mistyped as "block"--not necessarily wrong, either) and ignored it like a cat.

Periodically, over the last couple years, a thought has surfaced in regard to that story--thematic things I could have done and didn't, ways to Occam's Razor some of the excessive curlicues in the backstory--and I made note of them and put them in the box, too.

And then, night before last, while my brain was running round and round like a sugar-buzzed squirrel on an exercise wheel, it flung an opening line at me.

With a shriek of protesting metal, the hatch opened, and Mule fell out of the palace-ship into the long grass of the Edrin Valley. He was trying to run before he made it to his feet.

And all day yesterday it nagged at me, so after I got my 750 words on Summerdown, I went back to work on this novel I haven't touched since 2002.

1313 words, and a new title: Cormorant Child.

Now, I don't know if this is going to last. I don't know if this version of the novel is going to be any better than the last version of the novel. But I'm in love with it again.

And I'm in love with Summerdown, too.

A shining moment of novelistic polyamory. I don't expect it to last, but I'm really liking the heck out of it while it's here.