Sorry I've been gone so long. I've just emerged from one of my periods of serious writer's block, which this time extended as far as blogging and answering emails. I've got quite a stack to reply to! For anyone who is patient enough to still be reading after all these months, let me see if I can catch you up. It'll probably take several posts!

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I'm almost afraid to write another post here after the response to my last post. You might be tempted to ask "What response?" since only two people put comments on the blog. But if you count the private e-mails, PMs, and phone calls, then it would easily qualify as the hottest post I’ve ever written. There were the people who felt like they'd been plagiarized expressing their feelings and fears and asking for advice (my response: I sympathize, but have no advice). There were the people who said plagiarism within fanfic is perfectly fine (I agree to disagree). There was the writer who said they only did it to show respect for earlier fanfics (I suggested that the writers of the earlier fanfics could be credited directly in that case). There was the writer who, on re-reading one of my books, realized she'd unconsciously been influenced by a couple of my scenes and offered to change them (I told her they were fine and commended her honesty and sense of responsibility).

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Just when I was ready to give up hope and settle for something second-rate, the last scene of Bounds of Decorum finally crystalized for me. I've been fighting with it for months, and no matter what I did, it seemed anticlimactic. I needed a conversation between Elizabeth and Darcy after their wedding, and I tried doing it outside the church (insufficiently private) at the wedding breakfast (unintelligible due to interruptions) and on the carriage ride to London (boring, boring, boring! I wouldn't want to spend time with those people!). The tone was always slightly off, too, not enough humor and happiness to balance the serious elements.

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My muse dropped by briefly, took one look at the scenes I posted a few days ago and sniffed. So today I have a rewritten version of the scene with Charlie, plus another new scene which may or may not stay around. I needed a break from the long series of scenes of X talks to Y in Meryton - it gets dull after a while. We're a lull in the action at the moment. I struggle with stepping back from a plot to see what its problem is - or rather I can usually see what the problem is, but my muse is notoriously uncooperative with my attempts to fix anything based on an intellectual decision. It's writing from the gut or not at all. But at least I got something this time, and I'm happier with the Charlie scene now.

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Uh, oh. I seem to have been outed. Either somebody posted a link to this blog somewhere, or there was a sudden influx of curious people to the experimental AI blog. In any case, to new readers, welcome! I'd tell you all about what I'm doing with this blog... if I happened to know myself, but I don't. I'm experimenting with this and that. It's a general writing blog, and while I'll probably post snippets here, it won't be a story-posting blog. At some point I may do that as well. The snippets are a way to deal with my difficulties writing when I'm not posting anything (yes, I know, this makes it hard since I also have trouble writing when I am posting something, but I've never claimed to be consistent!). My goal is to make it to the end of my current three projects (Bounds of Decorum, Morning Light, and a nameless short story) so I can take on something new.

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