I imagine some of you are more interested in how my Work In Progress is coming along than in my flounderings in the unfamiliar waters of book narration. So I’ll tell you about that part of the business tonight.

The Baldur Game continues dormant for the moment. This is a good thing. Every writer (except for those wild geniuses who can solo on the first flight) has had the experience of getting a piece just as good as they believe they possibly can get it, and then they put it aside for one reason or another, and discover, on taking it up again, all kinds of howlers and barbarisms they’d never guessed at. It’s like the wallpaper in your house. After a while it goes invisible. Time away lets you see it with fresh eyes again, as if it were someone else’s work. And someone else’s work is infinitely easier to critique.

So I’ve got the book out right now for reading with three friends, whom I’ve instructed to be bloody, bold, and resolute. Give it to me straight. I may not be able to take it, but I’ll pretend I can. Act like a professional.

That’s what being a professional means, really.

One of the readers has already started offering suggestions, and some of them seem to me quite good. But following them up will mean thinking some things through, plot-wise. Plotting kills me. I’m not a plotter by nature. Four characters in The Baldur Game are noted as good chess players – Erling Skjalgsson (my hero, in case you’re new here), King Olaf of Norway, King Knut of Denmark, and Jarl Ulf of Denmark. I wonder how well I’ve portrayed those men, these good plotters. I’m told I don’t write women very well. I wonder if I write leaders well.

Then there’s the eternal problem of when to stop tinkering. There are writers, I’m told, who never get to the point where they think a work is good enough. There’s a character in Balzac’s Pére Goriot, if I remember correctly (I read it in college), who has been working on a novel for years, but has never gotten past the first sentence. He sits down to write each day, and immediately finds something wrong with that one sentence, and then spends his whole session revising it again. We know he’ll never complete the novel. His aspiration surpasses human capabilities.

I’m not like that, thank goodness. Eventually I do come to a point where I’m pretty sure that if I tinker with the thing any more, I’ll just spoil it.

It’s also possible I’m just lazy, and have thus failed to achieve my true potential.

But that sounds silly to me.