Bleeding Fiction

Also: You Will Never Defeat My Thousand Cuts Style

I should probably confess to the world that I own an X-Box. I got it not long after I got out here to Seattle, in response to a promise I made a while back to The Ogre�. "You need to get an X-Box and X-Box Live," he said to me, "so we can still play video games together when one or the both of us go off to school." Or words to that effect, anyway.

For the past seven months or so, as a three hour time difference and our schedules allow, I've met The Ogre� in cyberspace, where he's proceeded to shoot down my plane, kick me into submission or blow me up with a rocket launcher. I've whiled away the idle half-hour on my own by flipping out and killing people. Mostly my X-Box has gathered dust.

Over the past week, though, my game-playing habits were somewhat dramatically changed by the arrival into my possession of two wonderful games. The first of these is not just super. It is also, as the name will tell you, deluxe. Plus it involves monkeys. These monkeys will not, sadly, steal for me. What they will do, however, is roll around inside translucent spheres atop strange and mis-shapen floating platforms while collecting bananas and attempting to reach the confetti-spewing goal under a strict time limit. The game isn't, strictly speaking, psychedelic, but it skirts the borders thereof with simian abandon.

I also got an exceedingly fun game that has a little something to do with Mythic China. Fox spirits, Horse Demons, dozens of martial arts styles, ancient masters and characters with names like Furious Ming and Radient Jen Zi. Yeah. Folks who've been paying attention to my inchoate ramblings over the last few years will note that I've got a small interest in things pertaining to the style of fiction loosely classed as wuxia. While this game doesn't really and truly capture the feel or spirit of the "genre" (example: no running across the tops of trees), it's cool enough that it's sort of put me in the mood again.

That was an intentionally loaded statement, set there to cunningly draw in your attention whilst I elaborate: I re-read the first two chapters of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms on Thursday night and re-read the first four chapters of the Outlaws of the Marsh, read the prologue of the Deer and the Cauldron and re-read portions of my own initial edits on Fire and Jade today.

Cunning readers will note that I haven't mentioned my first novel in nearly four months, when I said that I hadn't touched it since May. That means that it's almost a year since I actually did any work on the second draft. Which is sort of pathetic. It's not like I haven't been doing other good and productive work in that time, but still...

My trouble right now is that I don't have the time. Or at least I don't have the time consistently. I mean, this past week I managed to play about fifteen hours worth of video games and read four hundred pages worth of fiction, as well as take in a movie on Friday and go out to dinner on Saturday. This coming week, however, I won't have time to do even half of one of those things.

So I could work on Fire and Jade, but it would come in scattered fits and stops, a dozen pages one day and then nothing for two weeks. Since the whole point of the second draft (and for this very, very scattered novel in particular) is seeing the whole picture, turning the parts into something that works together, I just don't think that's going to fly.

I could really use, say, a month off. I'll get one of those in August. The trick is going to be keeping my enthusiasm high until then.