I can't say the last two years have been the best years, but they have been my life. 2025 I had a blood clot in my retina and my vision went haywire and to a certain extent it is still haywire. Thanks to the technology of glasses, I have 4 pair of glasses to see perfectly. One is for just living regularly, such as walking, watching TV, going to the store or other places. It has corrected my vision in one eye to where I can read a chart like a pro. I have two pairs of glasses for using the computers and related gadgets. This is my desktop, my laptop, my iPad which is a very large one. I also use these glasses for personal writing in my journals, planners, etc. To READ a book, a Kindle normally, my mail, pay my bills, I have another pair of glasses. I am blind in my right eye. And in the next few years, I will face some kind of surgery which no doctor in Memphis will perform at this moment. There is always a small risk I could go blind following surgery, so these things move slowly. In 2025, I could not do much serious reading and very little writing but by hand.
So, the project I started in late Oct 2024 did not begin again (with exception to oral notes I recorded and some small hand notes) until 2026. I began reading slowly, allowed 20 pages at a time. I wrote what notes I could on my book and made all the changes in my head then dictated those. It was February of this year before my retina doctor told me to my face that I could resume my normal activity on reading and writing provided I rested my eye at intervals. I have been very obedient. Twice I have faced some issues which were just related to allergies and dry eye. But they scared me.
In dealing with all this, I now have time to think, to pause, to put spaces between me and the work, I began to develop good skills on how to improve my story, how to learn how to develop new skills at writing, and how I could write a novel much better than any version of my ambitious idea. I call it ambitious because it is a kind of book I have never written before in any genre. It is really a novel. But it is a fantasy. Time let me see how I could move from familiar tropes. I wrote a lot of my current project out of order and yes, by hand, which I really do like. There are pauses in writing by hand, more time. The awful expense for that is getting it from the paper to the computer screen. It is time consuming and a lot of extra work which I often end up sighing long sighs about because I am just not happy with that pace.
That said, I am resigned. This slower pace has let me think better, take more risk, learn new things, and realize that I am writing a good story. I just have to finish.
One of the things about writing a book set in history, even if it's a strange history, is research and getting everything straight and keeping it straight. I tried to hire a young assistant to help me but you would not believe the young people who cannot read cursive and all my notes, drafts, notecards, you name it, are all in cursive. That situation became more tangled than it was worth it.
I suppose it will all work out or it won't. But writing this novel is all I really think about these Days besides my artwork. That has suffered, too. And this summer I decided I had to make some changes in my daily habits to finish my work. I began to clean and organize my papers aka plots, notes, timelines, character notes, numerous drafts on paper, and so forth. I organized all my research books. I found new and better ways to do this organization and create a unified system. I had time to paint and draw and work on other art projects. I actually had time to read books just for pleasure and one should always be able to read just for sheer pleasure. I slowly began to form new habits about my journaling and note taking.
I learned a lot more about writing too by studying good books and reading some great books on writing. I wrote some short fiction, something which gave me the greatest joy. I learned to deal with my perfectionism that I had developed with this project. I never had it this bad on any other writing in my life. But this is my novel, the big novel, the ambitious fairy project that I have had my mind set on for a long time and it has finally become a mature work, too, something it never was previously.
I never grew up wanting to be a writer, certainly not a commercial one. I just fell into writing by an odd set of circumstances. It was good. I learned a lot. I made money. I got a taste of what the other side of the publishing industry is truly like. I made friends. But now I want to do something really different than what I once planned when I first came to this project. What I thought of at the end of 2024 and am writing now is a new book. Nothing is the same but one thing. No names, no setting, no characters, no plot, no style. Laughing. So many errors and failures have led me here. So much strange outside circumstances.
I am, oddly, grateful.
P.S. This is a no edit version. I can't worry about that anymore.
