too much story or not enough

A common symptom of a writer at work: vacillating between being confident I can bring this book in at 100K and being sure I can’t. On one hand, I’m feeling like if I’m not careful, MAGIC & MANNERS is going to end up *longer* than PRIDE & PREJUDICE. It certainly is if I keep following P&P as closely as I’ve been doing, although it’s also diverging more, so I don’t necessarily have to follow so closely. The second half of P&P has sort of a lot of faffing around with…

Continue Reading

Downton X-Men

Not that I need anything else to do in my Copious Free Time, but last night I wasn’t even thinking about my Downton Abbey/X-Men mashup (did I mention that? the other day I had an X-Men/Downton Abbey dream and thought, damn, that could work. WWI-era superheroes, that is, more than actually fitting Downton Abbey to the X-Men (which could also work but I don’t see getting to do that any time soon :)) and I realised I could use that world to do Evil Hat Fred’s “World War G” idea,…

Continue Reading

Recent Reads: Edwardian Murder Mysteries

Last fall sometime I read MC Beaton’s SNOBBERY WITH VIOLENCE, which I enjoyed very much (as I do nearly all of Beaton’s historical romancs) and asked for the rest of the quartet for Christmas so I could finish them all before doing a Recent Reads on them. A couple weeks ago I picked up the 2nd book and found it…incredibly disjointed. There was no flow from book 1 to book 2, and while it had been a few months since I’d read the first, I didn’t think it had been…

Continue Reading

I need a TARDIS.

I don’t know what happened to January. I mean, yes, I know what happened to January: we had the flu, or something like it, and totally lost a full week or more to being sick. And then Ted had a week off and somehow I got a lot less work done in that time than I imagined I was going to, and now it’s the end of the month and I’m sick again. For God’s sake. I’ve gotten…15K or so done on MAGIC & MANNERS, which is pretty good, but…

Continue Reading

bloody monday

This morning as I was getting dressed, Young Indiana appeared in the doorway and said in his Confessional Voice (which is slightly tragic and solemn), “Mommy…I have something to tell you. I washed the blood off in the sink all by myself.” Then he proudly displayed his hands, which were red with dried blood, and said, “I was putting my fingers in my nose last night because it was drippy.” Yes. Yes, it apparently was. And then it was very bloody, to the degree that he brought me to show…

Continue Reading