Today is my husband’s birthday, so I’m baking a German chocolate cake and we’re going out to dinner at a really good restaurant tonight. Mmmm. :) I turned in the copy edits for SHAMAN RISES last night, which means the Walker Papers directory is one final edit pass from being moved into the Finished Projects folder. Pretty strange, after 14 years of working on them. Just, wow. I note that the 28th of January is the 201st anniversary of the publication of PRIDE & PREJUDICE. This may be relevant to…
Category: Writing
an unexpected gift
I’m doing copy edits, which is the least fun part of anything, on SHAMAN RISES. They’re actually very light this time; the only real issue is that the copy editor and I have a violent disagreement over the Oxford comma (I am pro; she is con). Anyway, so I was reading along and suddenly something TOTALLY UNEXPECTED happened in the book! And then something else TOTALLY UNEXPECTED happened! And–it kept happening! I had completely forgotten all of the revisions that I’d done last summer, and I was sitting there reading…
& it’s off!
STONE’S THROE is off to Evil Hat, which means, barring edits on it and SHAMAN RISES (which are due Monday) I’m out of contract. Normally this would be a terrifying time in a writer’s career, but I’ve got some irons in the fire; my Guildmaster Saga, the YA novels I’ve been working on, are being shopped around, and I’m looking at Patreon to do a MAGIC & MANNERS crowdfund. So those are cool things, and we’ll see how they go. Everything else is longer term (like, y’know, stuff I’m planning…
boom: it’s a draft
Ten days and 35K later, STONE’S THROE can be called a draft. It’s a god-awful mess and needs serious revision, but the draft is done and the rest can be fixed. By Wednesday. @.@ Actually, there are parts of the book I’m happy with, and it came in at the wordcount I was aiming for, so I’m okay with that. And, er, I actually find that having finished it, I’m kind of hoping for the chance to write The Further Adventures of Amelia Stone, so I guess we’ll just have…
a quoteable morning
It’s been a pretty quoteable morning around here. First my son and I were playing superheroes and he said to me, “Who is in that Iron Man armor?” I said, “Tony Stark, and he, quite reasonably, wanted to know who Tony Stark was. I said, “A philanthropist playboy billionaire genius.” Young Indiana said, “Like me?” Just like you, honey. Just like you. <3 :) Then over on Twitter, Alastair Reynolds (@AquilaRift), whom I like a lot as both a writer and a person, said, for some reason, that he won…