Last night was Kim Stanley Robinson’s talk at Hodges Figgis. It went really well: the audience was full and there were a lot of great questions, almost none of which I can remember right now. :) Someone asked about ESCAPE TO KATMANDU, which I haven’t read and which apparently I must, and ANARCTICA, which is actually one of my favourite KSR novels (and turns out to be one of his favourites, too, although it evidently made no blip at all when it came out) was mentioned, and there was someone…
So I’ve been looking into what’s necessary for submitting self-published books to major review sites (RT, PW, etc) and the answer is primarily “a long lead time.” Several months. Four, for RT, ideally four but 3 is bearable, for PW. Which means if I want to get REDEEMER in for a late October launch, just post-Octocon, I have to have it written and edited by 21 June. AAAAAAAAAAGH. Written, yes, it will be written. But *edited*? Like to the editor, returned to me, and revised? That seems…unlikely! I mean, I’m…
Beth Cato, author of the splendid CLOCKWORK DAGGER books, said she’d love to know more about my outlining process(es) for series. bahahahwoooohahahahahaha ahahaha bahahah hee hee hee *wipes eyes* Okay. No, seriously. *laughs* Seriously, it’s an excellent question/thing for me to think/write about. The truth is I’ve become much more serious about outlining in the past few years, but I haven’t yet taken it to the series level that I’d *like* to. (I should, in fact, be looking very hard at REDEEMER and perhaps MAGIC & MANNERS in those terms…
I’m pretty certain that if I’d been introduced to the idea of “desert island books” as a child, A LITTLE PRINCESS would have been on the short list. I can’t possibly count how many times I read it, although I either didn’t own it or had a hardback edition, because I did not, as I did with my paperback THE SECRET GARDEN, read it to literal pieces. I re-read THE SECRET GARDEN last year and found it, if possible, even better than I had remembered it; A LITTLE PRINCESS is…
I’m home from Dysprosium, which was a very pleasant weekend away. All my panels and things went well–the kaffesklatch was full!–and I spent most of the rest of the weekend at BarCon, without going to many panels, although I went to a few and had fun at them. It was *great* to see Jim Butcher again, as it’d been since, like, 2008 or 2009 since we’d met up. It was also pretty funny to hear him telling stories about things I’d been there for, especially the origin of the Codex…