Senseless Violins

Man, my playing is bad.

I got in a good practice session today. Did nothing but try to get the bow straight, relax my death grip on the neck, get the right pressure on the stroke, and cross the strings over a scale.

A fascinating thing for me is how much it isn't like learning to ride a bicycle. There isn't a magical moment where you finally get the motion right, and after that it is much easier. The motion is always hard. You are always having to control weird little noises. The bow is always bouncing. You fingers are never perfectly on the desired pitch. Instead of not having to worry about those things, what you gain over the many hours of practice is skill in dealing with all these things as they happen.

So, yeah, the fact that you are consciously having the same problems but doing a better job of hiding them makes you your own worst critic. But I think I have enough background in listening to, mixing, working with musicians to recognize what a certain level of ability entails in the way of cleanliness of articulation, focus of tone, accuracy of pitch, and adherence to tempo.



Writing is an oddly similar task. You will always be aware of where the problems are, and only get better at hiding them from the reader. And there is an equivalent of muscle memory. Over the first years or first 100,000 words or whatever you have to keep stopping to check that you are in the right tense, the consistent POV. You are measuring paragraphs and counting lines so the pacing is consistent and there's a good balance of dialog and description. And, yes, outlining in great detail.

And over the next 100,000 words that stuff becomes basically instinctive. You can still pull it to awareness at any time, and tweak and adjust to meet the needs of the story, but you don't have to step out of the flow in order to make your verbs agree or check the Oxford Commas.

Which is good, because I've gone a little crazy on my current writing.

I'm excited again about writing for publication. The story I'm tinkering on won't take massive research or world-building and I have hopes I can get it done in a year.

But I do want to complete the Tomb Raider/Stargate crossover and put that away, rather than leaving it on a back-burner. So I'm adjusting the outline to let me conclude within the next four chapters (which, at my historical rate of progress, is about four months!)

And I also got re-invested on a simpler piece, "Sam I Am." A fluffy piece, first-person POV through the snarky, profanity-laced voice of a secondary character from the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot. The only research I've been doing is looking up titles and directors of documentaries (it is a running gag; Samantha is canonically a documentary film-maker, so I've turned this into her version of the Junior Woodchuck's Guidebook; whatever the plot needs her to know, she conveniently remembers the details from a documentary she saw once.)



This would be so much simpler if I had my strength. Cardiologist is supposed to be contacting me this week. With luck, when he sticks a camera in there he'll find something that we can actually fix. Until then, I'm taking long naps immediately following work and there go all my productive hours....