then there are the days you (almost) come out even

After much procrastination, both before and during the session, and some 1200 words revised, a particularly muddy section of the second novel of The Binding is now officially fixed. The first draft had Amalia1 being evil, when really she's just impulsive and spiteful, so now all the evil occurs at her brother's instigation. This works much, much better, and quite frankly I'm not sure why I didn't realise that first time around. Who knows. Writers is nuts, after all.

Of course, 1200 words revised only puts me slightly over halfway towards today's have-to target, and only a smidge over one-third of the way towards today's would-love-to target. That would be because I still have lots of catching up to do.

Spawn and Brutus2 are visiting, you see, and by golly are they timesinks. Yesterday while I sat writing, Spawn emptied the cupboard, one hairclip at a time, narrating each object all the while. Hair clip! Hair clip! One two many hair clip! Medicine, for sore! Soap! I never realised I had so much in that cupboard, to be honest. Once she'd done all of that she dug out my shoes and my bag and said, That shoe, that bag, find choo choo train now?

We took her to see model steam trains on the weekend, you see, and we haven't heard the end of it since. She was so insistent that on Monday night we found ourselves at the local train station, watching trains come and go, for over an hour. I suspect the people at the station were starting to wonder if we didn't have a television and this was our next best cheap entertainment option.

This pic is totally unrelated to the post. I just visited the zoo recently, and who doesn't love otters. If you can count three, there's nothing wrong with your eyesight

This pic is totally unrelated to the post. I just visited the zoo recently, and who doesn't love otters. If you can count three, there's nothing wrong with your eyesight

  1. I realise that none of you, save for my beta readers, know of Amalia, but I have enough trouble as it is talking about books that have no titles [↩]
  2. Incidentally, there's a new girl at the dayjob who, on hearing me talk of Spawn and Brutus, gave me a horrified look and said, 'They're children? I thought you were talking about dogs!' [↩]

Everytime (Glen Hansard & Colm Mac Con Iomaire — Even Better Than the Real Thing 2)

29 October 2008 @ 14:41 | 2 Comments

it's the end of the world as we know it

My editor sent back the proofs with a few queries and additional suggested changes, so I spent yesterday slicing and dicing words and chapters.

LOTS of markup. To my surprise, however, this was a quick page to get through. Go figure.

LOTS of markup. To my surprise, however, this was a quick page to get through. Go figure.

Some I've-lost-count-pages later, it is done and all the chapters are of much less variable proportions. Subconsciously I must have known what I was doing, since I didn't have to chop any scenes to get the chapters to line up, but consciously I suspect my chapter formation process is along the lines of "How many pages since I last inserted a page break? Can't remember. This'll do. What do you mean I can't have a 300 page chapter followed by a 3 page chapter? The 300 page chapter has scene breaks, after all…"1

Thank the lord for editors, is all I can say!

Today, my brain feels like mush, but it's straight back to revisions on the sequel for me. I am having a dreadful time resisting the urge to start the revisions again from the first page each time I do an edit-pass on Shadow Queen and figure out some new writerly tic I need to eradicate. For example, I suspect I have an aversion to joining words so deep-seated it makes my eternally patient editors and proofreaders weep with frustration. Um…oops?

  1. Some authorial exaggeration is to be expected here. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story is what I say. [↩]

It's The End Of The World As We Know It (R.E.M. — The Very Best of MTV Unplugged)

22 October 2008 @ 10:39 | 5 Comments

i can see a lot of life in you

My immune system is at war, and it appears to be a protracted siege rather than a single onslaught. I was ill on Friday, fine yesterday, and ill again today. This is not my idea of a rollicking good time, let me tell you that much! While ill today, I managed to watch Peter Jackson's King Kong (which, no, I hadn't seen before now) and I will say this much of the movie: was it, in actual fact, seven millennia long? I think dinosaurs evolved, rampaged and died during the screening of that movie. Granted, the illness may have been screwing with my timesense, but even so. EVEN SO.

Tab-closing:

I discovered this awesome photo through Stephen Fry's twitterstream. Which reminds me, my cousin took a couple of humdinger photos while she was over in Africa; must see if she'll let me post them on the blog.

I dropped by Elizabeth Bear's blog this morning, for the first time in ages, to discover this post on outrage and cynicism.

Telling people who are outraged that their naivete is mockable is the moral equivalent of telling a teenager with a desire to become an artist that they're better off getting a secretarial job than trying for a scholarship, and they should plan for disappointment. Of course they're going to be disappointed. Life is about disappointment.

Living life well is also about doing something about that disappointment. And trying to stop people from making the world better makes us into people who suck.

Word.

And now, since I am feeling betterer enough to blog, it's time to try and get some work done on the novel.

The Dress Looks Nice On You (Sufjan Stevens — Seven Swans)

19 October 2008 @ 17:42 | 4 Comments

pondering the deep questions

Oy vey. The start of this novel really is problematic. I would cry "What was I thinking?" except I suspect the answer is that I wasn't thinking. Or rather, I was thinking too much, and not finding the answers I needed, and therefore reduced to feeling my way. I'm hoping that once I sort out the opening chapters, it will start to flow a little more smoothly. At least the retaliative catch-up strike is proceeding apace, yesterday's virus notwithstanding.

Right now, the television is blaring about Kath & Kim — The American Version, the circularity of which makes me cringe. I have never understood the American urge to take a successful tv show, staff it with American writers, cast and crew, and reshoot it. Is it meant to be an homage? Is it meant to sanitise American television of anything non-American? Is it related to the publishing trend Justine was talking about a couple of days back? Do other countries do this and I'm simply not aware of it?

And why oh why does Australian tv feel the need to air our original series back to back with the American remake?

I grow old, I grow old
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled

18 October 2008 @ 20:41 | 6 Comments

if i had a tardis, i would've written it by now

Belated apologies for my silence over the past couple of days. Somehow (it might, I dunno, just maybe, have something to do with the increased connection speed I am currently enjoying) I managed to exceed my internet plan's quota, which means every extra byte is costing ludicrous amounts of money. Oops.

You might think that having no internet would allow me to be more productive, but alas, you would be wrong. Procrastination always finds a way. I did manage to mail the Shadow Queen proofs back to the publisher, which has left my desk startlingly clear. Seriously. Two stacks of paper each 400 odd pages deep takes up a lot of room. I'd forgotten the top of my desk was that colour.

With the proofs gone, I'm now free to start concentrating on the revisions to the sequel, which have been languishing unloved and unattended for far too long. And by "far too long", I naturally mean "this book was due in June 08".

Oops.

On the upside, I am promised sunshine and lots of it today, so I think I shall enjoy the benefits of laptop ownership (can you believe the burglar missed the laptop?!) and work outside. Huzzah!

20 September 2008 @ 9:40 |

oh call my name. you know my name.

I hafta say, the number of people who oppose or fear or distrust the toe sock is a little worrying to me.

If I owned more than the single pair of toe socks, I would wear them every day for weeks and months on end, and treat you all to photographs every day, in the interests of teaching you not to fear, or at the very least wearing you down into submission. Sadly, I only have the one pair, and photos of them are going to get same-ish mighty quick. So you are all off the hook. For now.

I've been doing my best, as per my previous plan, to work on several projects at once. Originally I thought this would only encompass the gamma draft of the sequel to Shadow Queen and the alpha draft of the faerie novel. Life intervened, however, and I added an outline and blurb for a paranormal short(ish) story and the proofs for Shadow Queen to that. Hafta say, this multi-tasking is breaking my brain. Don't quite know how grown-up writers manage it.

I'm also not entirely sure how helpful I'm going to be to my publisher in proofreading Shadow Queen at this point, since I appear to be reading what has been hammered into my head by previous drafts, rather than what is actually on the page.

Nothing Without You (Vienna Teng — Dreaming Through the Noise)

18 August 2008 @ 17:59 | 6 Comments

i've just examined my life and found it wanting

The Pope, the evening news tells me, loved the koala. This is not particularly surprising — everybody loves the koalas.

I have finished the small stuff on the copyedits, and have only the big-fix pass to go. This, of course, is the slower and more frustrating pass, as it forces me to dig ever deeper in an attempt to fix something that was already, last time I saw it, the best I thought I could do. Once more into the breach!

(Also, the fact that I have used the word "fix" twice in the past paragraph is itching at me. Clearly, my copyeditor is having an influence on me.)

In utterly trivial news, my aunt has a cat who routinely stares at the wall. She parks herself facing the wall and ignoring all others in the room. Apparently she can do this for hours. It's her way of coping, now that she's not on the kitty equivalent of valium. It's a concept guaranteed to make me giggle, quite frankly.

16 July 2008 @ 18:16 | 6 Comments

where's your dunkirk spirit?

The copyedits slog on, and the further I wade in, the more notes I leave myself of the "yeah, come back and fix this, definitely" nature. This is the part of the process where I start to despair because I seem to be making more notes to self than I'm fixing. The mindset is entirely untrue and entirely transitory, of course. The only cure is to keep on keeping on, until the manuscript is finished. Such is (this) writer's life.

Today, just to prove that parking yourself in front of a computer for hours on end can be a dangerous and tricky affair, I discovered a tick biting me. A tick! This is because the cat, now he's all grown up and thinks he's smart enough, insists on venturing outside on a daily basis. Which would be fine, except he likes to visit the enormous snarl of obviously tick-infested lantana choking the gully behind the house.

I have also, of late, been experimenting with that most infamous of social network sites, facebook. Is it the most evil site ever created, or not? All these websites with "friends" networks, people who are allowed in and people who are not, irrelevant snippets of information about what your "friends" have recently been doing in terms of what applications they've added or what utterly illogical quizzes they've taken, trivialising social interaction.

Or maybe that's just me.

Don't mind me if I go a little silent over the next couple of days: it's my weekend, and I want to fix words while the dayjob is out of mind.

15 July 2008 @ 17:07 | 5 Comments

take this sinking boat and point it home

Successfully caught up, and am now ahead of target by 14 pages. Not as much as I'd hoped, but I am sluggish due to oxygen deprivation today, what with fighting off a lurgy. I have taken to drinking Benadryl by the tablespoon, not that it helps much.

Today I learnt that I have been spelling carcass wrong, probably all my life. Apparently the British spelling, and therefore the version I as an Australian should use, is carcase. News to me.

In other news, hearts are tricksome things, and not to be trusted. That is all.

Falling Slowly (Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova — Once)

13 July 2008 @ 20:06 | 6 Comments

the writer … er, at work?

Copy-Edited Manuscript: 0.999

Author: 0.001

3 June 2008 @ 13:04 | 2 Comments
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