Line edits for HANDS OF FLAME have been sent off. The end of the book has been revised to vast improvement, aligning much more closely now with my original vision of it, and I’m really pretty happy with it. There are a couple of stages left, but the book is very close to publish_ok now, and I am very very happy about that.
It does mean I’m going to have to face the 70,000 word bugbear in the room now, though.
Let’s see. Oh! Apparently HOUSE OF CARDS is going back to print (less than a month after hitting the shelves!), a fact for which I am deeply grateful. And I got a starred review for THE QUEEN’S BASTARD from the ALA Booklist magazine in the April issue. Given that I have had this on-going fear that the reaction to that book (despite it being, IMHO, the best thing I’ve written) will be, “Murphy debuted in urban fantasy; she should have stayed there.”, I am also *extremely* grateful for a very nice review.
On less self-congratulatory topics, from the “Getting To Know You” meme, the1pony and shartyrant ask You said the other day that if you were someone other than who you are, you’d get a tattoo like the one in the gorgeous phoenix drawing by Gabriele Dell’otto. I’d like to know why the person you are wouldn’t do it.
The answer:
Partly it’s that I’m forever torn on whether I really like tattoos or…not. I like the idea of them. I like the color, I like the idea of painting the body, I like the individualism.
I am not nearly so keen on a physical alteration which is, for all intents and purposes, permanent. If I could get that tattoo in a long-term semi-permanent fashion–something that lasted months or even years, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I might even get it at that *size*, which is terribly dramatic.
Partly it’s that if I wanted to have and display body art of that magnitude, I would want to have a truly killer body. I don’t think I’ve got one.
If I did get that particular image, I almost certainly wouldn’t get it at that size, or in that location. (Maybe at the small of my back.) But then I think, well, what’s the point, then, since I wouldn’t even be able to see it? And then, the problem with putting it on actual display is:
I think I’m too conservative. I have plenty of attitude and ambition and things, but when you get right down to it my hair, my dress, my lifestyle, is really pretty boring. I know that tattoos are a much more common form of decoration in the general public now than they were twenty years ago, but I feel that in order for *me* to pull something like that off, I’d have to … be much cooler than I am. I suppose “I want to be cooler” is something we should all get over at around age fifteen, but I’m not really sure I ever will. :)
ytd wordcount: 95,100
miles to Minas Tirith: 192.3