A frustrated Spokesbear is dangerous

I’m drinking my second cup of coffee of the morning, revelling in the fact that I’ve been awake for nearly three hours now and I don’t yet feel the need to take a nap. Huzzah for reaching the end of the medication, although the celebrations are tempered by the fact that I head into the dentist for stage two of my root canal this afternoon. I know nothing about the art of dentistry, but the implication after my last visit was essentially “if the infection’s still there, we’ll have to remove the tooth instead.”

I’m okay with removing the tooth, to be honest, as long as it doesn’t come with another round on medication. Experience says I have a predilection towards sloth that shouldn’t be encouraged and I have phobias about returning to the slacker mindset that dominated my early twenties. Or, to return to my new years resolution: don’t fuck it up, dumb-ass. I’ll take a week of jaw pain over a week of sleeping any day.

My medication-induced narcolepsy would bother me less if the project du jour wasn’t doing the rewrite on Cold Cases, the second Miriam Aster novella. It’s not that I begrudge the fact that it needs rewriting – I dig rewriting – but there’s a certain element of I’d really like this to be done, now, please, when it comes to this book. I’ve lived with it for far too long* and it’s still playing coy, refusing to reveal the right beginning or structure. And it still suffers from its lingering bout of sequelitis, despite my attempts to strip out the signs of infection. Frustration abounds. Especially since I’m only paddling around in the shallow end of the rewrite, grabbing an hour here and there, rather than diving in and immersing myself in the book again.

The Spokesbear, of course, is raring to go. He’s been making notes, re-reading Horn to wrap his head around the narrative voice, and generally preparing for two weeks of total immersion in the manuscript. Impatience makes him testy and unbearable, but what can you do?

Right now, the best I can think of is go eat some porridge.

*well, not with Cold Cases specifically, but much of last year was spent thinking about the book that would follow Horn, and this is the second attempt at it.