Verlaine or Rimbaud Saturday, February 19, 2005

Once again, as the Chief said, I been away a long time. You'd think I had a baby or something!

Wrong Turn Jr. is wailing in the other room as momma tries to get him to sleep. We thought he had conked, but it didn't take. He's been getting more stable and responsive, more like Our Little Boy than Baby #45547; he doesn't go quite as nutso at bedtime or when he's hungry. But he has his backsliding moments. Either he's teething, or new stimuli are freaking him out. Whatever it is, the lad's got some lungs on him.

I've also been working a lot. The job is picking up after a long winter's nap, and the original Secret Thing, which we all know now is a game called Damnation Decade, got kicked back to me for a complete rewrite. It's a Twilight Zone moment: All these years I've been pulling Vic Morrows on reporters, and I finally get my comeuppance.

But the fixes are justified, which makes everything go down easier. My editor is one of my closest pals, and he's earned a lot of trust over the years. When it comes to fiction (or game writing), he's the one guy in the world I would follow off the Empire State Building, if you know what I mean. His advice on my first draft was subtle and savvy, and saved the book--more or less what he's done to everything I've written in the past six years.

So, two personal questions to kick around. What am I becoming? Wrong Turn Jr. is changing me into something adultish, a little more autumnal. I'm feeling mortality, real mortality, for the first time, but it's not weighing down on me: It feels as formal and welcome as a suit after years of T-shirts and jeans. So what is it, exactly? And what happens next?

Second question: Why do I screw around so much with first drafts? Some careful planning would have obviated most of the mishegais I'm rewriting now. Instead, I let myself pile up ideas until I had a skyscraper's worth of words balanced on premises as thin as a playing card. Why? Anybody have a clue?

Good to be back. Please save a prayer for my friends' baby, who's having surgery very soon.

@ 8:40:00 PM, ,