Pledged is duly rechapterised, and I'm celebrating by … starting another project straight away.
Yeah, it's not particularly smart, there's this little thing called downtime which I hear is really effective in guarding against burnout… but this project (untitled, like all my new projects, which makes blogging about them tricksome at best) is a short story, and contracted, so I kinda hafta start it now. If I want to, you know, eat. No biggie.
I also have one (contracted) novel outline, one short story collection critique, and one (uncontracted) (for now) novel outline that needs doing sooner rather than later. It's a good thing I don't have a dayjob at the moment. When I quit the baby mines, everyone was saying things like, "Oh, wow! Two months off work. Think of all the sleeping in you'll be able to do!" I always smiled and nodded, but in my head I was replying, "Actually, I was thinking if I got up early every day, I'd be able to squeeze in even more writing!"
It's a sickness. Really.
Here, to distract you, have some links:
3 January 2009 @ 8:55 |
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Aaaaannnnd…..book.
Or at least, close enough to call it book. I still need to go through and check my chapter lengths, because I have a feeling (er, I know) they got dangerously out of control in the second half of the book, what with all the revisioning. I have a nasty habit of not bothering with scene or chapter breaks. Ludicrously short or asphyxiation-inducingly long, that's how I write if left to my own devices.
Those of you who've read Shadow Queen will have a hint what I'm talking about, because you'll have noticed the book is basically ONE SCENE with convenient page breaks thrown in, courtesy of my editor (because a) she's nice and b) she didn't want my reading public to fall over dead, or alternatively to hunt me down and beat me over the head with a book that didn't let you get any sleep because you couldn't find a convenient place to stop reading). Trust me when I say my beta readers have suffered.
I did somehow manage to add over 10,000 words to this draft. That's proper words, not manuscript-words: I added nearly 20,000 of the latter. Luckily, I also cut almost as much as I added, so the book is currently at 120,000 manuscript words, or 100,000 actual words, so right on target. (Although a 20% discrepancy between actual and manuscript count bugs me. That's a lot of white space. But perhaps the rechaptering will fix that.)
It occurs to me the problems I was having with the previous drafts of this novel might have been because I, um, skipped bits. Just maybe.
And now, if you'll excuse me, I plan to celebrate. By doing no novel writing whatsoever for the rest of the night rechaptering. (Yeah, I know…)
1 January 2009 @ 17:32 |
2 Comments
I keep losing days. Today is Monday, apparently, but I'm pretty sure yesterday was Saturday. This means I'm either going insane, becoming ever more inattentive, Sunday was totally and utterly exactly the same as Saturday and thus they blurred into the one day in my memory… or Sunday just vanished out the calendar.
I'm betting on the last one. For sure.
My inattentiveness and the sameness of my days would have nothing to do with the deathmarch status of the revisions, nosiree, why do you ask?
In other truly momentous news, yesterday (er, Saturday?), Spawn greeted Brutus with the phrase "Hey, Brutus!"
Wiktory! My work here is done.
29 December 2008 @ 17:38 |
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There has been a sighting of Shadow Queen in the wild, in fact two separate sightings. One of them, unless I'm confused by the message on my answering machine (always possible), was at an airport newsagent, which was the cause of much amazed muttering of "Airport!" around the house. Much as I would love to provide photographic evidence, I would not love to brave the Christmas crowds surrounding the sighting within reach, so we'll all just have to use our imaginations.
Meanwhile, I am sitting at the desktop, slipstreaming SP3 into my XP installation disk, and backing up all my drivers. Oh yes, people, we're going to attempt to reformat the desktop. I would have preferred to finish the novel revisions first, but the monitor has now started in on a wacky and fun new game of powering down, then trapping itself in a random power-half-up-power-back-down cycle. Kinda hard to revise when you can't actually see what you're revising.
This could get ugly.
If I disappear from the net for the next little while, it's because I couldn't install something correctly, and I'm wailing and gnashing my teeth and generally bothering my IT-superstar brother with panicked phone calls in the middle of the night.
Or because I'm writing the novel.
But let's face it, writing the novel never kept me away from the web before. It's far more likely to be geek failure.
20 December 2008 @ 14:26 |
3 Comments
I'm nose-deep in the final stretch of the current round of edits on Pledged, and it's a good thing that my A&U sent me my author's copies of Shdadow Queen because I kid you not, I can't remember the story. Oh, I know the gist, but the details, the details are killing me. I have no idea which of the myriad details of the myriad versions made it into the final published copy. Is this normal? It's probably normal. Let's at least all pretend it's normal.
In other news, my listening history on Last.FM is really taking a beating now that I can't have iTunes running. Plus, it's really quiet-like, and hard to concentrate. Also, and here's a sign of just how much I'd come to rely on iTunes for my music, I'm currently not coping with the fact that my CD player only plays one CD at a time. That's only 50-70 minutes of music, and then I have to physically get up and change the CD. Oh, the humanity!
16 December 2008 @ 20:14 |
As a brief addendum on the when can I buy it? issue, I am reliably informed at least one store is talking about December 19 as the on-shelf date. Make of this information what you will.
I have spent most of the weekend pondering the pc vs mac dilemma, and am no closer to an answer. I suspect I desire a MacBook for three very important reasons: the pretty, the Scrivener, and the avoidance of Vista. But are these enough to make the switch? H'mm… I have researched the word processing options available on the Mac, and am not thrilled with iWork's Pages inability to save in rich text format as a default option. Exporting a file all the time? Bugger that for an idea, if you'll excuse the vernacular.
Anyway. While I'm sure the inner workings of my mind, and my inability to make a snap decision, are of the utmost interest to you all, perhaps I'd best move right along, eh?
Unfortunately for the lot of you, there's very little to move on to, my free time at the moment being entirely consumed by the novel revisions, so I will leave you with an absolute corker of a malapropism I discovered today (but cannot find again now to link to or take a snapshot of) buried in the reviews of apple's time capsule:
It's an ascetically pleasing addition…
15 December 2008 @ 19:03 |
7 Comments
29 November 2008 @ 19:23 |
2 Comments
Okay, whoever it was that linked to Pandemic II?
You owe me I've-lost-count hours of my life.
Seriously, how can I concentrate on revising this novel, when there's humans to wipe out? How can I concentrate on wiping out the human race efficiently and effectively when I have this novel to finish? Huh? Huh?
25 November 2008 @ 6:45 |
2 Comments
In the lose-some department, news from my agent is that one of the UK publishing houses considering Shadow Queen has decided to pass. C'est la vie.
In the win-some department, Google Alerts is a dangerous wonderful thing. Today it informed me that Issue #18 of PostScripts Magazine will be released in Spring 2009, and will contain my story, "The Wages of Salt". Okay, so this isn't new news, since this is a sale I made long enough ago that I've long since been paid and spent said payment, but it still counts, because I'd forgotten about this story and am excited to see it slated for a firm publication date.
In the er…oops department, I really shouldn't have had that bourbon and coke. Now I'm sleepy.
21 November 2008 @ 18:52 |
6 Comments
Sometimes I think my metaphors require more research than the rest of my novels' worldbuilding put together. It can be tricky, in a first draft, to hit a metaphor which is in keeping with the worldbuilding but at the same time not so unwieldy that a modern reader is going to stumble over it. Yesterday I spent a good twenty minutes researching the history of barbed wire (invented in the 1860's, in case you're curious, so barbed wire itself was out) and chasing mentions of the use of "thorny brush" as a fencing/deterrent which could have provided an analogous metaphor … only to realise that the simple fish hook, which has been around since time immemorial and requires no fancy descriptions to be understood by any reader, was a far more apt metaphor for the situation.
Um, yeah. This is how I spend my time. Willingly.
24 (Emmy The Great)
11 November 2008 @ 12:21 |
2 Comments
