scribbling damselfly

And the winners are…all of you!

That's right. Because I couldn't face the thought of some of you missing out,¹ I went to A&U and said, "Um… could I possibly have more than 2 books for the giveaway?"

And, because I am signed with the absolute best publishers out there, they agreed to let me send a copy of the book to everyone who commented.

So if you put up your hand, email me your mailing address. Let me know if I should be signing the book to someone else or to yourself (or not at all, if you'd prefer an unsigned copy), and I'll get the books out in the mail as soon as I can.

Congratulations! I hope you all enjoy.²

1. this does not bode well for maintaining a hard-hearted reputation, does it?
2. And, um, don't kill me when you realise it's a year until the sequel is published.

I'm nose-deep in the final stretch of the current round of edits¹ 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!

1. For those keeping track at home, or attempting to, this would be what I call the gamma draft, or the draft which, when completed, can be shown to my editor

Yesterday, I gave notice to my dayjob. Farewell to the baby mines for me! In four weeks, I shall be walking out of their doors, never to return. No more semen samples, no more discussions with patients about the consistency of their menstrual flow, no more explaining the convoluted process of the Medicare Safety Net and how it works (or fails to work) with our invoicing system, no more chasing people for money… Well, actually, four more weeks of it first, but then…!

Much as I would like to turn to writing full-time, my writing income (which term I use very loosely, meaning not income so much as lack thereof) is not quite up to that. Instead, I will have a couple of months away from work, after which I will be moving cities and starting a new dayjob.

It is not a particularly good economic climate in which to have a break between paying jobs, and I am not a personality type which copes well with uncertain, vague, or rapidly changing circumstances… but I'm doing it anyway. And I'm looking forward to it.

So, here's to following your heart random whimsical impulses…

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.

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.

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.

I'm back! Did you miss me?

It's been a strange and (sadly, for the sake of my deadlines) largely but not entirely unproductive little while. Here, have a quick, incoherent, and utterly non-linear recap:

I met a girl by the name of Emma, and discussed with her the wondrous situation she enjoyed of being ungoogleable.¹ I then spent the rest of that evening marvelling at Emma's inattentiveness when — after listening to her mobile phone ring, to ensure she had given out her number correctly — we received a call from none other than Emma, opening with the phrase… "Hey, I just had a missed call from this number. Who is this? Oh! You! Yeah, did you need something…? Then why did you call…?"

I often found myself in front of awesome trees. Seriously. Look.

this tree is totally made of win

I found myself captivated by a ute bearing the sticker "UTERUS"² and spent probably far too much time trying to work out just what, exactly, the ute's owner was trying to convey with this epic fail of a pun.

This snippet of footpath graffiti also captured my attention.

it's the singular but glaring grammatical issue which intrigues me

I walked into a bookstore with a $20 voucher, and walked out with $80 of books. I wanted to walk out with $140 of books, but restrained myself. The mathematically canny will already have worked out that the actual amount I should have paid is $60. In actual fact, owing to the fact that the gift voucher in question was apparently rare as hen's teeth, processed differently in different stores, crashed the system once, and accidentally cancelled once, I may have paid $20, $40, $60, or any combination thereof. We'll see when the credit card statement arrives, I suppose.

1. To truly understand this, you'd need to know her surname, which I shan't share with you because imagine my horror if I suddenly made her googleable? It would be a travesty! It wouldn't happen, because that is the magic of her surname, but you'll just have to trust me on this one.
2. I did take a photo, but I won't inflict it on you as the bumper sticker was too grainy, owing to the fact that I was driving at the time and couldn't spare a great deal of finesse for the fine art of photography. Oh yeah, photographing while driving. I live on the edge. You know it.

For those of you who don't read Tessa's blog (are there any of you?), her bouts of nightshift, while sometimes throwing her off-kilter, are pure genius for the rest of us.

Previously, she's indulged in the 7 wishes.

This time, she's writing a choose your own adventure.

Go. Choose. Enjoy.

Proofreading: the process perhaps best described as "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

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.

One of the hardest parts about a revision, I find, is simply starting the dang thing. The whole concept is just too daunting. There are so many things to fix, and in my abortive fledgeling novels said fixes are never just a simple one-line tweak but rather involve complicated novel-length rearrangements and convolutions and the memory capacity of, well… an all-remembering thing.

Yeah, kinda fell over there, didn't I? It happens.

So this afternoon I have done what I should have done days ago: I printed out the novel onto paper and skimmed/read it, noting down a very rough outline. (This would be the sequel to Shadow Queen, for those keeping track.) I don't know why I've avoided the print-it-out trick before now, because it really is the best thing to wrap my head around the plot and where I can insert scenes and where I can delete them, and what I wanted to change and what my beta readers think I need to change… In other words, when I print it out on paper, it's not so daunting any more.

So, note to self, for future revisions (because, hey, I'll forget again, in time for the next revision): Stop hesitating. Smoosh the margins and reduce the font and print two pages to a sheet if you must, but just print it out already. You know you need to.