Scraps of progress

Six people have asked me this week for some form of status on my writing projects. It seems I'm due for a progress report.

Category: My Other Body
The web site is almost ready to re-launch. Once that happens, several new marketing projects can roll into place quickly. I'm working on the five hardest pages now - all landing pages, which are supposed to hold the reader and get you to click around the site. Also I saved until last the new section of the site for other projects I'm planning.

Category: Changes for Sunspot
See, the section of the web site about new projects is scaring me, because it's essentially a space for fantasies right now. Will I really launch a poetry magazine? Will I really publish new interviews with interesting people? Or are these just mirages in the mirror, self-delusions of which I have grown fond? You see, I don't trust my dreams to do anything but keep me asleep. I am so content asleep and dreaming of what I might do with my life. I purr. And my life passes while I sleep, my pitcher of heartbeats pours itself out. This is not sad while there is love. But it is not the way to wake or share happiness.

Category: The Novel
As I work on dialogue, I wonder about the lives of the fictional people we create. We place them under such a narrow lens -- a few relationships, a conflict. But this is not the way real people live in our webs of memory and family and media. When was the last time anyone in a book you read had cousins that they talked to? When was the last time anybody had a palpable relationship with the routine world of bills and news and neighbors and groceries and budgets? I know those things don't make for gripping reading. But they should be part of the fabric, shouldn't they? Part of the texture? I'm interested in writers who know how to put their characters in a big, rich world while keeping the reader's eyes on the line of the story. (As Compilador pointed out in a previous comment, A Hundred Years of Solitude is going to be a good book to re-read.)

So. That's how the writing business is going. A little too introspectively to make good time, but at least I'm done correcting the fonts and realigning elements throughout my web site, and that's happy news to me.