I guess I have to finish writing it first, and I didn't know this, but the hardest part about writing a book is ALL THOSE WORDS. The easiest part is ALL THAT DRINKING.
» The name Mudpuddle has now been adopted by immediate and extended family.
» I will be in Melbourne this coming weekend. Melbourne! Me! There will be attending of Rufus Wainwright concerts and a trip to the zoo. Anyone down that way wishing to catch up with me (which will be from late Saturday afternoon until Monday afternoon), please fling me an email and I'll give you my mobile number. I'll be checking my emails right up until Saturday morning, but internet access while in Melbourne will be sporadic to non-existent.
» News from A&U: the first golem book (which is still lacking a title, but shall henceforth, for the sake of not typing out "the first golem novel" all the time, be known for now as Bound) is scheduled for April 2009.
» The second golem book (which I am still in the process of breaking) will, for similar reasons, be known for now as Pledged.
» Both these titles are subject to change. In fact, they're almost guaranteed to change. But in the meantime, I will glory in typing only a single word in reference to the monsters 
» For various entirely dull reasons, I am currently debating the name under which I should publish these books. So! A poll!
[poll=5]
Vote! (You know you want to. Go on — how am I ever to make such a momentous decision on my lonesome?)
ETA: I'm not sure the poll plugin is working 
You can still vote "manually" in comments
Came home from work yesterday1 to find the invisible tree2 outside the eastern windows full of rainbow lorikeets. More precisely, one adult lorikeet, and a swarm of babies, all drunk on the goodness that is the invisible tree's seed pods.
Wildlife that not only doesn't kill, maim, or harm you but is actually pretty and cheer-making? It's a world gone topsy-turvy!
[↩]The words, they are slow today. This is partly due to hitting a part of the manuscript which needs persnickety changes, and mostly to do with my attitude, which can best be described as restless. Or, more precisely:
They're everywhere. I can't walk two paces outside without stumbling into a web and devolving into panicked swipings at my head and back in a vain attempt to rid myself of the silk and (more to the point) any possible spider.
This year it's little black and orange beggars everywhere.
I can't remember if I've seen them before. (He looks quite large in the photo, but that's just me, playing with the macro function on the camera, which I shoved up close until it was about two centimetres from him.) He's barely the size of a fifty cent coin, but he has grand ambitions of catching a human, because he is determined to spin his web across every doorway possible. Sometimes he's so quick that the web I walked into (and spluttered out) on my way out the door, catches me again on my way back in.
I'm told he's a mosquito-eater, and harmless. This does not particularly comfort me, as harmless in Australia does not always mean harmless. "Relatively harmless", for example, means it won't hurt you so long as you don't get close enough to annoy it. Harmless mostly means it won't hurt you badly. The fact that he's small is also no consolation: redbacks and irukandji are both small.
This morning I met another harmless spider, this one in the house: a huntsman. I couldn't get a great shot of him, so he looks smaller in the photo, because see the way he's sitting on the wall? That's an unhappy huntsman. Looks a bit like God's first experiment with macramé, doesn't he?
He's harmless, though, because he's not generally aggressive1, and a bite will "merely" hurt, swell, and itch like buggery. You know, nothing major. Your limb won't drop off or anything.
At least they don't spin webs. Although they do have that nasty habit of hiding under the sun visor of your car. That's never fun.
Notes I left myself from the first draft:
Note to self: when Character A has a voice permanently encamped in the back of their head, it is not necessary to say "Character B said in the back of my head" every. single. time. Quit it already.
Eep! I thought I was 20,000 words from the end. I've been telling everyone 20,000. But I'm only about 7,500 words from the end. How do I fit the battle and denouement and epilogue in 7,500 words? (When will I stop sucking at estimating a novel's length? I spend 90,000 words despairing I don't have enough novel for a novel, and the last 10,000 panicking and cramming.)
When your advance cheque arrives, you do not cash it immediately — in case your publisher contacts you with the news that it's all been a dreadful mistake, and the cheque's been cancelled. After some small eternity, you muster the courage to deposit the cheque — but you open a separate account and dare not touch it. That way the money will be ready. You know, in case.
You are, ergo, a constant source of amusement to all who know you.
This is some consolation for the unstoppable force of your own irrationality.
Spoke with my mother today and asked her why she didn't give me a hippie name.1 She said if she had given me a hippie name, it would have been Mudpuddle.
Guess I got off lightly, all things considered.
Bitch Ask, and ye shall receive. The clouds haven't cleared, but it's stopped raining. Briefly, anyway. The cicadas are taking advantage of the break to shriek at each other throughout the valley, and the bloodsuckers are having a field day. I am most definitely not stepping foot out of doors without shoes, because all this rain will probably have washed those wandering male funnel webs uncomfortably close to the house.
Revisions on the second golem novel continue apace. Things looked rocky at the start there, where it took me hours to fix a paragraph, but now that I'm in to the meat of the story I've found, to my utter and endless surprise (because writers is nuts), that the prose isn't quite as abysmal as I'd feared. No doubt my beta readers will all remember this post and gleefully point me back to it when they send me their comments, which will be peppered with "This sentence? Makes no sense." Me, I'm just happy to be past the panic attack caused by accepting money for an incomplete novel.
I've gone back to the writing routine which worked for me during the first novel, back in the days when my only thought was of actually finishing a novel and I hadn't even considered the idea of submitting it for publication. Back then I worked five days straight, and took a break from wordcount on the sixth day. I still worked on that sixth day: mostly it was research, or a chance to let the plot catch up with my head. Not having to churn out words made the day feel like a weekend, though. Right now, I enter the sixth day with grand plans of writing anyway… but I don't. Taking a break is important, too. It really shouldn't be a surprise to me, I suppose, that the process I found useful on my first novel might actually be my natural process. Go figure, eh?
Also? I love my new icon.
Ah, summer…! How I've missed your cloudless skies, your warm dry sunshine, your beach-going days…
Australia. The lucky rainy country. Except where it's not. That enormous mass of green on the eastern coast? It's very wet. Also, the summer sun is still actually present, above the mass of clouds, which is making everything muggy, and fertile breeding ground for bloodsuckers.
I would like to apologise to all and sundry: on the last known day of sunshine, I foolishly tempted the gods and washed my car. The thought "Well, it hasn't rained in ages, so it should be okay…" even crossed my mind. That very evening, the heavens opened and dumped filthy water all over my sparkly car.