INSIGHT: Moving towards an end on a wavering course

I realise “being busy” has become my go-to excuse for not posting new chapters.  I wish it were otherwise, but there is no other explanation I have.  If you have pursued any kind of writing to the point of researching wisdom on the craft of writing you have no doubt come across the sentiment that a true writer makes the time to write – finds the discipline to write regularly.  You are going to have to take it on faith that that is not the case here.  My issue is not so much a matter of discipline for writing, but a huge disconnect between the amount of writing I can complete now that I am a family-man and the level of output I used to be able to maintain.  Gone are the days of locking myself away in my room for three days straight and coming out with a well-polished first draft stage or screen-play.  I can’t imagine how I could possibly make that happen again now.  I certainly can’t make it happen at home, and the chances of retreating to do the same are remote at best.  I do still find the time to write, but the reality is that my efforts are spread too thin.  I focus my main energy where I must and rarely is that on the novel I am serializing on-line with no pressure of fixed deadlines.  So as a result, Necropolis gets neglected.  But not entirely.  I do nudge it forward.  Necropolis does get more of my pillow-time imagining as I fall asleep than any single other project, and I do manage to find an hour or two to actually get words down.

I plan to do so tonight, (I am writing this on a lunch break – not enough time to really allow myself to get in the zone the way Necropolis really requires.) and hopefully I will actually finish the second and third parts of the chapter I am currently writing.  They are mapped out on paper, ready to be fleshed.  Once I have finished the chapter I will begin posting it – probably three installments – and when it is done, part two of book one will be complete.

But that is not why I began writing this update.  This morning I was listening to an interview with Scott Sigler on The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe.  It was quite interesting.  I liked it a lot.  I have never missed an episode of SGU and Zigler is a writer who, as one of the legion of online writers, I am pretty much obligated to respect.

Towards the end of the interview, the conversation drifts to a discussion of the merits of two story telling styles.  It hit close to home.  Specifically, they began by discussing how both Lost and Battlestar Galactica ended up solving their plots with a weak magical explanation that was in both cases infamously unsatisfying.  Myself, I wasn’t terribly disappointed by either – I suppose I had already told myself that there was no way the shows could live up to their set ups.  But I recognize that both ended considerably less well than their promise.  The gist of the conversation revolved around how these two largely science-framed tales which both promised that they knew where they were headed turned around and “solved” their plots by resorting to a mystical solution.  This is a MUCH bigger discussion than I have patience for here, but it did lead to relevant thoughts for me.

The interview went on to reference a George Martin (Game of Thrones) quote: something to the effect of there being two types of story tellers – the first is the architect who builds the foundation with the intention of it supporting the frame as designed and which itself will ultimately support the walls and decor according to the blueprints; the second is the gardener who plants seeds, then sees where they grow and applies care, coaxing, weeding and trimming as necessary.  In the case of Martin, acknowledges that he is a gardener, despite the appearance of architecture.  In the cases of Lost and Battlestar Galactica they claimed in various ways to be architects, but in the end it appeared as though they were gardeners.

I think I must defend both Lost and Battlestar Galactica on the grounds that I have a fairly good idea of where I am headed with Necropolis.  I have a notebook that is carefully partitioned into sections for arcs of each of the major characters, many secondary characters (including a few who won’t appear until Book Two) and even a few tertiary ones.  I have pages for notes for each part of each of the three books.  If you were to flip through the notebook (No. You can’t.) you would find that the early portions are significantly more detailed than the later ones.  But the last part of book three does have a clearly definable conclusion and I do have a rough plan of how I am getting there.

But here is the catch... (a catch I suspect both Lost and Battlestar Galactica both got caught by)... the individual elements do take on a life of their own (a writer’s cliché, I know, but not any the less true for being a cliché) and head off in independent directions that are hard to impossible to control.  Note that I never originally planned for Sarah to be a major character... but there she is.  I also, just his past week had a realization about another character – one that I cannot discuss much at all here as I would be spoiling portions of book three (but, see I do know where it really impacts in the plan) – that fundamentally changes the arc of said character as well as one other.  This latter change I cannot control without rewinding and re-writing parts of the past book and ultimately weakening them... and that is not an acceptable solution.  I have written said character in such a manner that they MUST change the way the latter stages of the plot unfold.  Either I change my intended destination – a huge change – or I must pay-off the promises of the character in question by giving them a significantly different role in how the endgame plays out.  I, at least, have the relative luxury I have provided myself, by allowing for some minor retroactive rewriting.  On a TV show, that tool does not exist.  You cannot go back and reshoot an inconvenient scene in the first season once it is the fifth season.  It is easy to get dragged off course by increments, and hard to get things to work right when you are dragged off.

I guess I am building a greenhouse.  It is a structure, but there is a lot of growing going on within.  (And to stretch the metaphor further, the glass walls are allowing the reader to look in and see how progress is going.)  It is my intention to maintain my intended destination at the end of book three… but there will no doubt be some meandering from the path along the way.  There has been meandering already, but thus far I have managed to make sure that all changes (that I am aware of – some sneak up on you by degrees) serve the story as I have had it imagined for years.  I suppose I have some more leeway than Lost or Battlestar Galactica as there has always been a sliver of inherent magic (so to speak) in my story.  While I am trying to make my vampire tale as sciencey as possible, it IS after all about vampires.

Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 18 - Installment: iii

Details taken care of, Vala sat before the visual-radio and began working out the new world she had awoken in.  No dials to change the station.  The radio appeared to only show current events.  Nothing cultural.  No succession of programming, merely more of the same hour after hour.

Gradually the confusing picture of affairs began to show form.  If Germany had not lost the war outright, it had certainly failed to maintain the planned Reich.  The United States appeared to have an undue influence in the world, though perhaps that was merely from the perspective of their Northern neighbour.  Clearly the States were at war with someone – it seemed probably a Muslim nation, but it was unclear which… maybe even a new one she had never heard of. 

There was much that needed more investigation.  New jargon.  A ubiquitous term, “internet,” that was either a universal encyclopaedia or a massive telephone system; something similar called “the web” which may have had something to do with a world wide postage system called “the ‘E’ Mail” which in turn may have been related to “’I’ Phoning” which appeared to be separate from the internet… probably.  And apparently the Earth had moved closer to the sun (which could not be good for her) as evidenced by the resulting global warming.  Seven billion people… how could that have happened?  Clearly vampires weren’t culling the herd.  Though it helped explain how this little name on the map, “Vancouver,” could have become a metropolitan centre. 

So very much more to understand, it will take some time to sort it all out.

The big news was vampires.  Here.  In a hospital in the city.  Clearly they were nothing like her, but superficially there were similarities.  They feasted on blood, but propagated by their bite, not by siring.  They appeared to be new – or at least the world had been unaware of them before now.

Her imagination tumbled end over end as she considered the possibilities.

How fortunate for me to wake here, now.  Have other nosferatu known about this new breed?  Or has it sprung up in the knowledge of man and vampire simultaneously?  Are there even other nosferatu here?  Most likely, but have they the wit to capitalize on this?  Or what if this is part of someone’s larger plan?  Doubtlessly they couldn’t have planned for me.  Who am I to turn my back on a little chaos?

#

Getting herself back into the city was a simple affair.  Finding the hospital was somewhat more difficult, though the goodness of human nature worked in her favour as the night’s drunken revellers were friendly and keen to give a lost stranger directions.

As she had seen on the visual radio, the entrances were all blocked and well guarded my modern foot soldiers that didn’t in fact look terribly different from their predecessors from the mid 20^th century.  Rifles and helmets remained the vogue.

Another thing that had not changed was the expectation that someone might scale an outside wall without aid or deliberation.  A dark corner was all she required for the first forty feet, beyond that – people rarely look up.

Inside, practically the entire population of the hospital remained in quarantine.  Vala could hide in plain sight among the staff and patients, and virtually none looked askance at her apparel.  Most were sleeping, but many still roamed the halls discussing their predicament, forming uninformed opinions of how long they might remain, or quietly wandering, losing sleep over the same questions.  From snatches of conversation, it didn’t take long to zero in on where the truly infected were being kept.

Stealthily she crept into the ward and with judicious application of broken necks and, where possible, the luxurious strength-building draining of an unwary attendant, the immediate guards and caretakers of the half-dozen or so freshly born vampires were dispatched.

Vala knew she wouldn’t have long before her invasion would be discovered, but it would not take long for her to recruit.

She lost several precious minutes working out the procedure for opening the sealed doors – an overly complicated system in her mind, when lock and key would have worked just as well… or as poorly as the case would be.

The door opened with a hiss.

Inside the room a man sat awake, strapped to his bed.

As she crossed the floor to him, he examined her face with appalled curiosity.

She found the clasp holding down his arm and whispered a promise to him.

“Free….”

Chapter 19

Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 18 - Installment: ii

        The child had escaped again.  Vala had been livid.

        If it wasn’t for that foolish father of hers putting up a fight. 

        It had not been a particularly effective fight, but it had been enough.  His meagre weapon had been ineffective offensively, but it provided him the slightest deterrent defence.  Being less than a day out of seventy-year torpor, Vala was not eager to return with an ad hoc stake lodged in her heart.

        She had been forced to wait for her moment, to wait for the father to commit, and then she struck with absolutely lethal intent.  It had taken, in total, less than a minute for her to dispatch the man, but her still weakened state seduced her to drink more deeply than she could afford to at the moment.  The combined delay gave the girl a big head start.  The fresh blood was saturating Vala’s senses, she couldn’t pick up on a scent among far too many other nearby human traces.  That curse of cities had not changed. 

        Vala ran down the smoothly paved street like a panther on the hunt, reaching an intersection and seeking any sign, visual, audible or olfactory, of the frail creature who had twice slipped away.  Nothing, and the trail was getting colder on the wind by the second.  It was futile.  She was gone.

        The father was still in their home.  His heart was no longer beating, but she was no purist.  The blood would still be warm, and she needed still to build her strength.  Vala drained him as thoroughly as possible, and then began inspecting the house.  It would provide, for the moment, a safe place to stay.

        Her own clothes were unwearable if she were to go out in public.  They were falling apart, and were decades out of style.  The girl’s clothes were too small.  There was apparently no mother, though there were coloured photographs of a woman, presumably the man’s wife, once healthy, then gradually wan and thin.  Tuberculosis perhaps.  The man’s clothes were oversized, but not troublesomely so.  Certainly wearing gentleman’s clothing would draw attention until she could find more feminine attire, but she would only be about in the dark.  Surely it would be less conspicuous than the foul half-rotten, half-charred garments she had – both to look at and to smell.

        Smell…. she had to bathe.  The bathing room and water closet were awkwardly combined in one room.  How can one be expected to cleanse in the presence of such a filthy construct?  And clearly the size of the bathtub has been sacrificed in order to accommodate space for the flush toilet.

        Being a pragmatic creature at her core, she suffered through a luxurious hot bath – the first heat of significance she had felt in nearly three quarters of a century.  The funk of those years was more deeply set than she expected.  Clearly a second or even third bath would be required to get out the deepest odours.

        The bed in the master bedroom looked fantastic.  The draperies were thick.  To retire here would be exquisite.  But before she could consider that, she would need to find a more secure place to rest until she could be certain that no-one else was likely to enter the house in the middle of the day.  A cluttered storage space in the subterranean level of the home would suffice for now.
Installment iii

Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 18 - Installment: i

        The nightmare deepened.

        Three summers ago while attempting to break onto a roof for no good reason but to see if he could,  He had fallen off a ladder.  It had not been pretty.  Awkwardly, he had fallen face first.  But his face was fine.  If his legs had not gone in different directions he probably would have either been dead or at least in a wheelchair.  It had been a permanent ladder – affixed to the wall.  His left leg went between the wall and a rung while the rest of his weight toppled forward.  The fibula is not made to withstand leverage of that sort, and once the fibula has snapped, the tibia doesn’t stand a chance against nearly the full falling weight of a two hundred pound man.  Muscle and tendons however are surprisingly strong. 

        He had hung from the meat of his leg screaming in dire agony until a pair of security guards found him.  The two guards called for an ambulance and lifted him down.  Breaking his leg had hurt, but getting said leg unhooked made him wish (briefly) that he had died, or at least broken his neck so he could feel nothing below his waist.  As they carried him down to street-level he watched his foot dangle like it was made of soggy foam rubber.  He knew that this one mistake would permanently change the course of his life.

        Titanium implants helped his leg heal – keeping his skeletal position as close to true as possible – and they did a good job.  But, the screws had lost their seating and though he walked better than he would have guessed, the bugling skin where the metal was gradually pushing further and further out from his bones was getting grotesque and felt more than a little disconcerting.  The time had come to remove the metal from his body before it became an actual cause for concern.  That was why he was in the hospital.

        The surgery itself had been a cinch.  No complications.  They almost didn’t keep him a second night, but the surgeon had decided last minute that they had a light patient load and that an extra night of observation was prudent without being excessive.  For his part, he figured we’ve got socialized healthcare in Canada, what’s the harm?

        In the dead of night his anti-inflammatory pain-killers wore off and he couldn’t sleep.  A buzzer would have summoned the nurse and the problem would have been solved, but his self-sufficient streak had kicked in and he manoeuvred himself into the bedside wheelchair and down the hall to the nurses’ station, knowing full well that they would chastise him for his effort once he got there.

        When he turned the corner of the hall, the night-nurse looked up and saw him.  From her look he was definitely in trouble.  She stood and marched towards him.

        “You only impress yourself.” She scolded. “There is no reason for you to be out of your room at this time of night.  We are here so you can rest, if there’s anything you need-”

        And then it hit her.  Hard.  From out of a dimmed side corridor.  It was a man, but in horrible condition and crazed.  She defended herself for perhaps fifteen seconds before she was either unconscious or dead.  With the fury the thing had attacked her, he assumed dead.  Blood was everywhere.

        His first instinct had been to help her, and he tried momentarily before a raking gnash at his forearm made it clear that he was himself helpless and he backed the wheelchair up as fast as he could while the thing continued to claw at the nurse.  Soon there was little question as to whether she was dead.  While the thing’s attention was still on her he rolled his chair into a bathroom, into the handicapped stall and threw the bolt… hoping that would be enough.

        Before long there was more crashing violence outside and shouting.  Soon it disappeared and all was quiet.  He waited until he heard calm voices before he came back out.

        That had been two days ago.

        At first he had scoffed at the suggestion that his cut might mean anything, but he had been put under surveillance with a number of other people – staff and patients – who’d received collateral injuries from the rampage.  They explained what they knew about the affliction and laid out the known symptoms.

        The first time he noticed he was hungry he didn’t even consider the possibility that it could be indicative of something more.  He ate when the meal cart came around and then closed the shades, wrapped himself up in a sheet and tried to catch up on some sleep.  But the hunger didn’t go away, and the sheet was too much… and for the first time he thought there was a possibility that he was royally fucked.

        Now that he exhibited a spectrum of symptoms that previous carriers of Cannibalistic Porphyria had shown, the quarantine had tightened even further.  He could not interact with anyone, even other quarantined patients.  He was confined to a room and the only people he interacted with wore hazmat suits, and worst of all, he was strapped down.  He didn’t need to be strapped down.  He was perfectly sane and in control.  But of course no one accepted that. 

        He didn’t want to be here.  He shouldn’t be here.  He shouldn’t have stayed an extra night.  He never should have tried to get on that roof three years ago.  He just wanted out.

        Early morning, a few hours before dawn by his guess, the door to his sanitized prison cycled and opened.

        The silhouetted figure in the doorway wore no sterile protection.  No hazmat.  Not even a filter mask.  A woman, wearing men’s clothes.  Vaguely Annie Hall-like.  She stepped in close.  She smelled… off.  He looked up at her gaunt face.

        She smiled and twisted open the clasp on his arm restraint, and in a heavily accented whisper that seemed half hiss breathed a single word…

“Free….”
Installment ii

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Writer's Block

Earlier today this comment appeared from Andy: "Just wondering how you're doing with this. I'm looking forward to more of this."

I received an email notification about it, I quickly broke from my reverie to read it.  The irony of the moment was that at that very moment I was in deep thought about a narrative issue I am struggling with.

No secret I've been slowed down considerably of late, but the current gap is even more than I could have imagined.  I had taken some time to work out some long-arc details that I needed to be considering in the current portion of the narrative, but that led to a troublesome place... I realized I had an immediate issue that needed to be solved.  Very immediate - like in the very next segment I have to write.

This is an issue as I am publishing linearly.  Normally when I'm writing a screenplay or something where I know I'm going to be coming back for a re-draft before any serious audience other than me reads it, I'll just put in some kind of place-holder.  As simple as "major complication occurs here" to as fleshed out as "Ray and Ernie find each other in the middle of the chaos and have an emotional confrontation about their trust issues, once resolved they are confronted by Pale who they nearly overcome, but he marches them at gunpoint back to the main room for the climax..."  That kind of temporary shortcut is of no use to me here, so I have to work out the kinks... even if I do have to come back and fix stuff later, it at least has to feel like it's complete when posted.

But right now, I am stuck.  Holy smoke am I stuck.  It is simply one detail, but it's pretty indispensible.  I have slowly worked out all the surrounding details, so once I figure out this last piece I'll be ready to go.  Meantime - just earlier this week - it dawned on me that I could be writing subsequent chapters that don't hinge on what is about to happen next.

The good news is that in all this pondering I have found new elements to enrich the narrative when I have the opportunity to include them.

Anyhow... I can't imagine it'll be much longer, but I can't really put a date on when this writer's block with break.

NOTE:  I am adding this note four days later (January 19th).  It is not a substantial change to the above, merely an update.  Not worth a separate post.
The piece fell into place.  I figured out what I needed to put together in order to move forward.  Frankly, I didn't expect it to come to me quite as soon as it did.  I could tell I was close, but I didn't think it was that close.
In the process something else happened.  In pondering I came up with a slightly altered timeline that I think is ultimately going to be more dramatically interesting without changing much of anything except order.  So now I am writing a completely different set of events (which I would have written eventually anyways) instead of what I was hung up on.
I've written the first of two sections.  I imagine I'll finish the second on the weekend.  I'm not going to post the first until the second is done, they are too inter-connected to risk posting before I am certain of how they relate to one another.
Once they are complete, then I will be on (finally) to the plot point that I was stuck on since before Christmas.

Book: The First - Part: Two - Chapter: 17 - Installment: i

        For as long as they had been friends – from before the formal creation of the Lazarus – Henri had always had a greater weakness for sleep than Marcel.  It no longer surprised him that he couldn’t keep up with his friend.  He had reached an age where getting sleep was a natural issue.  He couldn’t make it through the night without needing to use the bathroom.  But he wore out more easily now, and they had always burned the candle at both ends.  He would cat-nap when he could, but polyphasic sleep had never been a skill he had truly mastered. 

        It had been a long day and a half since the capture of Nikolai, and the organization had been monitoring the situation at the hospital all day.  They had always been busy – always – but this was a truly unusual level of immediate concerns.

        He had only just settled in for a few hours of desperately needed rest when he had received the call about that fool new recruit.  Yet another issue that couldn’t be left un-attended.  Simon had returned to the training complex in the early morning with a young woman.  He had brought her through security as if there was no reason to have security.  If this were a job, Simon would have been unceremoniously fired.  But that wasn’t an option.  It simply wasn’t the way things worked or even could work for the Lazarus.  A certain level of trust was a necessity, in theory made stronger by recruiting only people who had no remaining ties and whose drive for the cause would be considerable.  But there was no antidote for stupid.

        Henri gave Simon a verbal dressing down in two languages, only one of which Simon spoke, but the fury that launched Henri into French did more than the words themselves could achieve.  A hale adult in his prime, girded by the transformation wouldn’t normally feel threatened by a frail old man like Henri, but his anger combined with the certain knowledge that he was only saying what Marcel, or Sylvette, or the massed collective of the Lazarus would have expressed was quite intimidating.  He was behaving like a rogue agent.  That could not be tolerated in their circumstances, it was simply too risky with such a wealth of secrecy behind them. Though he didn’t out right say so, Henri made sure that Simon would feel as though he would not be given a second chance, and that should he step outside the operational boundaries of the Lazarus again that the consequence would be dire.  The more complicated discussion would follow; the one with the girl.

#

        “I hope you will forgive us.  We don’t mean to be inhospitable locking you in like this.”

        Sarah had only checked the doors to the lounge out of curiosity.  She had not even been surprised that she was effectively a prisoner.  The room itself was comfortable.  She had tried to watch some television – catch up on the news of what was going on downtown, keep her mind off her past two nights.  Mostly it was re-caps of what had happened so far.  Families were getting angry and concerned about their loved ones quarantined inside the hospital, and had set up vigils outside the cordoned-off perimeter.  Nothing dramatic enough to keep her exhausted body awake.  The couch was soft and warm and seemed to nearly devour her slim form whole.  She was content to slip into a deep rest for as long as she might be allowed.

        She couldn’t tell how long she had been asleep – a few hours at most – when the knob turned and the elderly man stepped in.  She couldn’t help herself from wondering if he might be a wizard or something.  Hell, there are vampires.  Why not wizards?  But he didn’t dress the way she would have expected an urban wizard to dress.  He would have fit in better on The West Wing in his suit than on The Dresden Files or Buffy.

        “We are...” Sarah guessed from his accent that he was pausing to find the right words in English. “...very busy.”  Or maybe not. “Your appearance here tonight is an extra complication which we are somewhat under-manned for.  Do not feel as though there is any threat.”  By which Sarah took to mean that there was indeed some kind of threat.

        “My name is Henri.”

        “Are you in charge of the Lazarus Group?”  She could tell from the look on his face that he was not prepared for her to know their name.  She had shown a card.  That may not have been a good move.

        “I am trusted to make decisions on behalf of those few above me in the organization.  And now we must decide what to do with you.”

        Definitely a sense of threat.

        “Well, let me try to help, ‘cause I am running out of options.  Your man outside confirmed what I suspected, so I’m confident you aren’t going to think, or feign that you think, I am nuts.”

        “Last night a vampire killed my father.  The night before, the same vampire killed my boy-friend.  The night before that, I thought vampires were nothing but either myths or larpers.  This particular blood-sucker may be after me personally.  Either that or it’s a huge coincidence that she got both my boyfriend – and a half dozen of his friends, I might add – and my father.  It may seem like I’m not as scared as I ought to be, but I’ve been staring death in the face for as long as I’ve been alive, so really I’m mostly adjusting to the fact that there are vampires and that one just fucking killed the only two men in my life.  I don’t know what to do or who to turn to, and I haven’t really got much else.  I don’t even really know what you people do – for all I know you are allied with the vampires – but I have little left to lose.  This is kind of my hail-Mary pass... if that’s appropriate.”

        So much for keeping cards hidden, that was just about all she had.

        Henri sucked his teeth in contemplation.

        “This is a very unique week.”  He sat in a well-padded arm-chair opposite Sarah.  “The Lazarus is made up of individuals who have nothing left to lose.  People who have come to that point to a large part because of vampires.  We make a habit of finding them.  No one has ever found us before.  This is very interesting, but it is also gravely concerning.  I can’t tell you how we will proceed – this is too unique a situation for me to determine without consulting our leader.  Nor can I promise that it will be fast or that it won’t be unpleasant.  But if what you say is true and you are so clever that you found us of your own devices, then you are absolutely in the right place.

Chapter 18

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is harder than it looks

     I was doing so well!
     I can't promise that I'm going to do much better than I am now for a while, but rest assured, this is not over.
    
     Perhaps I should loan this a bit more context...
     So, blah, blah, still learning how to be an effective part-time stay at home Dad... but I do think that in the past few weeks I've truly started to find my feet, so to speak.  Still amazed at the sheer amount of time my regular pay-cheque job is sucking out of my life between hours worked and commuting time.  Oh my god, the commuting time!  But I've managed to unload one shift at the regularish job and replaced it with a one-day-a-week video-editing contract which begins to bleed some flexibility, sanity and breathing space into my schedule.  (And as I can do it from home, the commute is about 18 paces.)
     So there is hope.  I am gettting writing done slowly but surely.  I've actually had a chapter finished for over a week now (will be posting it after this note), it has simply been difficult to find a time to get around to posting it.  My various other creative projects (most of which align more directly with what I consider to be my vocation) all get priority when I have windows of time to work.  The number of opportunities I have to dedicate to Necropolis has severely diminished. 
     But last week Jodie kicked me in the pants... figuratively.  With all the hammering my schedule has taken in the past six months or so, the one thing I've made a point of not allowing to slip is my time for her and I.  For the most part that has meant that we spent some time virtually every evening watching the shows we love the most.  Really, that's just a few TV shows.  Dexter, and Being Erica* are the perennial favourites, with Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother bering close seconds.  We've given up on nearly everything we've started watching new this season.  Up All Night (which could not possibly be aimed more directly at us as a demographic) and Pan-Am are both hanging on by their ragged nails to our viewing schedule.  ....I am getting WAY off topic.
     Anyhow...  Jodie said last week that really we should be able to do all our TV watching in two nights, still have one night a week for movie night, one night for whatever comes up - including, god forbid, going out and having a life - and then I could use a few hours three nights a week for working on my myriad projects.
     And that is where I am at now.  This is my third night for working on projects.  I used the first two for reviewing footage for a documentary I am working on (more details on that when it becomes relevant) and tonight I am first doing Necropolis catch-up, then getting my bearings on at least one of the screenplays I've got mouldering in my brain.

     My intention is that I'll still be able to give at least half of one night a week to Necropolis, maybe more.  Which should mean that I can get a few posts a month out.  That is nowhere near the pace I need to keep up if I am ever going to finish this tale before I'm collecting my pension (I am exaggerating,) but at least I'll be moving forward.... and maybe I can actually find a way to make better time than that.

     Only time will tell.

*For non-Canadians, I highly recommend that you go out of your way to see this show.  It is frikking awesome.  Yeah it kind of sounds a little girly and it took a bit of work to get me to try it on for size, but it only took one episode once I tried it.  I'm not going to spoil it at all.  Just see it.  The show is really easy to see in Canada as it's a CBC created show, but it has done really well in other markets, so it ought not be that hard to track down.  There are both British and American versions in the making (which, frankly is a bit insulting), but you ought to be able to find the real deal easy enough, and it is in the same language for both Brits and Yanks.  Oh and... the lead is played by a girl I went to theatre school with... though I was in fourth year when she was in first year and I admit I don't actually remember her from then - but she is fantastic.