Let It Bleed - Jeri-Smith-Ready

Recent Reads: LET IT BLEED

LET IT BLEED is book 3.5 of the WVMP RADIO urban fantasy series by my friend Jeri Smith-Ready, and is what happens when the publisher decides they want four books instead of five and the author turns the salient events of book four into a novella to offer her readers for free so she can wrap up the series in a way she feels is satisfying. This is in every way awesome. And the novella is, in and of itself, fine. My problem is with a decision Jeri’s made for…

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the essential kit

revision and review

Revisions on SHAMAN RISES are taking a ridiculously long time, because I have to keep looking up details–names, aura colors, locations–in other books. I have only had to resort to Twitter twice, although it might in general be faster to ask Teh Intarwebs instead of searching my own manuscripts. :) I also finished watching the first season Downton Abbey last night. I think…that I will probably not continue on. The final episode left me disgusted with the two older sisters, I loathed the Lady Grantham/O’Brien story, and generally don’t think…

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Mountain Echoes by CE Murphy

brain fry

I went through the entire SHAMAN RISES manuscript in one pass today. This may have been a mistake, since it’s nearly impossible to retain any degree of impartiality after about a hundred pages in one day. But I’ve done the first revision pass, and holy crap, that book hits the ground running and doesn’t let up. And either it hangs together a lot better than I thought it would or I’m far too close to it right now to see its glaring errors. After a few detail fixes and a…

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the essential kit

So cool!

Okay, that’s awesome. I just got an email from a friend–the father of the boy that Billy Holliday’s son Robert is named for, in fact–who said he was hanging out with his son’s class on a beach day, and he (the father) was reading the Dresden Files. A girl asked what it was about, and he said “A wizard in Chicago.” “Oh, cool,” she said. “I’m reading something similar, but I can’t remember the writer’s name right now. I’ll get it for you.” “Heh,” my friend said, “I actually know…

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the essential kit

Not this world.

Me, to Mom: Want to do some hired sitting this week? Mom: What book are you about to write now? Me: Just polishing up the last Walker Papers. NEXT week I get to write the Spirit of the Century novel for Fred Hicks/. Mom: In a *week*? Me: It’s only 60K. It is possible there is something wrong with me. (And also, no, I am not going to be writing a 60K novel in a week, although it’s *theoretically* possible. That theoretical world, however, is not this one. :))