Very Much At Home: A Brief Update

Hi Friends,

Just a quick update on the new Uncanny Valley book and related stuff, since some people have been asking. My goal over the summer was to write another 30,000 words of it, but my divorce and the move that went with it took up most of my time and focus.

With that in mind, I only ended up writing 22,000 words this summer. That said, just yesterday I took a look through my writing log and realized those 22,000 words include 12 new story-chapters, all completed over a six week period. The book is now 66,000 words long (about 220 pages, divided into 33 story-chapters), and I’m estimating it will take another 20,000 words, about another dozen chapters, to wrap up the rough draft. So there’s still much to do, but I’m also happy with what I was able to complete in the midst of a very unusual summer. Besides, keeping personal deadlines is great, but simply crossing the finish line is more important, regardless of the detours that have to be made or how long it may take. I crossed several important finish lines this summer, and will cross those related to the book in due course.

So now I’m in my new apartment, completely unpacked and feeling very much at home. And while teaching, especially during Covid, takes up a lot of my creative and professional focus at the moment, those 220 pages of the new book have found a semi-permanent home on my new kitchen table, so I can dig in, revise, and edit whenever I have the time, and take inspiration from my new library/living room just across from it.

For example, this morning, over coffee, I was skimming through a biography of Zelda Fitzgerald and came across this beautiful quote from her:

Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold.

Truer words have seldom been spoken.

Until the next time, stay well and Happy Fall,

Greg