Catching Up

2/25/2015 03:11:00 PM Lexie Dunne 0 Comments

Hi!

So I missed Monday’s blog post (first time in 2015) because I had a deadline then and between an all-nighter and focusing so much on Supervillains Anonymous that I forgot to eat, the blog just slipped my mind. Hilariously, I have some generic posts written to prevent exactly this from happening and yet it still did.

I am nothing if not determined to be ornery, it looks like.

At any rate, I haven’t really checked in personally lately so I thought I would do that. How’s everybody doing? Any fun news to pass along? I’ve been so buried in writing away that I’ve let several things pass me by, and I think one of those is keeping up with other people.

Book 2 of the Superheroes Anonymous series (series title as ever still pending) is shaping up and the form is starting appear among the blob that was all of my ideas barfed onto the page. This book has been at times the most difficult thing I have ever written and the easiest thing to tackle. Part of it—and I had people warning me about this—was that it’s a sequel and sequels are difficult. I should have a post next week up about my long history of neuroses and sequels. But it’s not only a sequel, it’s a sequel that I came up with in 2008.

That’s right. Parts of this book* have been lodged in my brain since 2008 and getting them unstuck and onto the page was like chipping away at mummified chewing gum stuck to the underside of a park bench. It was scary. It was one of the scariest things I’ve ever done, in fact, to take ideas that had been fermenting for so long and put them onto the page. Because the thing is: in your head, these ideas are amazing. They’re safe. But the minute they’re exposed to open air, they change. Sometimes it’s for the better, sometimes it’s much worse, but you never really know which you’re going to get. Writing consistently and copiously over the years has allayed these fears a bit and it’s ensured that I have a better chance of knowing what will happen to these exposed ideas, but carrying this book around with me for so long has made it feel like I had to rebuild my entire existence as a writer from the ground up to be able to write it.

And let’s just ignore the fact that I procrastinated horribly and shot myself and my immune system in the foot.

But yeah, the first deadline is passed, I’ve had my breather, and now I forge on ahead to get the rest of it in. Hopefully my editor likes the crazy direction I’ve managed to take the series. Book one is an origin story. Book two switches genres with delightful abandon and laughs at me whenever I try to shoehorn it back into place.

In other news, I’m about ready for winter to be over. I’m sure the people of Boston and the south would agree with me on this subject. It’s not terrible here. The main issue affecting me personally is that there’s patchy snow on the ground, and it’s melted hard and frozen back over to form a hard, slippery shell. Annoying for me, but it’s the bane of Nikki’s existence. She’s not heavy enough to break through the shell, so instead she slides around like a furry bowling ball of misery. Grace and I are a great comfort to her in her time of pain and suffering.

When we’re not on the ground ourselves, cracking up, that is.

Nikki’s way of dealing with this injustice is to look at me, as though to say HUMAN, FIX THIS. She appears to be operating under the mistaken belief that I control the weather** and can right the wrongs of this slippery snow as easily as I right the wrongs of her not having a treat in front of her after her walks.


But the good news is that the crunchy, scraping noise my car has been making is apparently Nora (that’s her name because Nikki and Nora) just pulling a Michigan J. Frog. The mechanic called me yesterday in confusion “I don’t hear a scraping noise?” Thanks, Nora, for scaring me for over two weeks JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT. Better than paying $500 for a new sway bar, though!

So that’s pretty much what’s been going on with me. March should be a month where I tuck down into revisions, and April brings fun wedding shenanigans and C2E2. I’m excited about both, though one’s going to make me wear a dress for the first time since 2009 and I don’t know how I feel about this.

Stay sexy!
Lexie

*it has changed a lot over the years, up to and including a plot rebuilt from the ground.
**I can control the weather, but it has consequences. Also, it only seems to work in places that have thermostats. I don’t know why that is.