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Stone’s Throe now available!
My pulp fiction novel, STONE’S THROE, is now available for general purchase direct from the publisher! It’ll be up on Amazon and other locations soon, I expect, and I’ll let people know when it is, but if you want it hot off the presses, you know where to go!
Oh! Oh! Oh! My former editor at Harlequin, Mary-Theresa Hussey, has launched a freelance editorial service, so if you’re in a position of looking for an editor, I can recommend her highly!
AND on that note, I have engaged her services for the editing of REDEEMER! I’m very excited about this, because I’ve, uh, worked with her on like 17 books, and I think she’s the perfect editor for that project! So *happy dance*! And actually that means I’ve got the whole production team lined up for that project, so all I have to do is, y’know. Write it. :)
Speaking of which, the goal is to start work on it in March. I’m within spitting distance of done with MAGIC & MANNERS (where ‘spitting distance’ means ‘god damn it this book is going to turn out to be 120K after all’), which will go through a quick revision process later this month and then go off to my other former editor who now runs an editorial service, and then I’ll be revising the hideously overdue 3rd book for my nephew. If all goes according to plan (which it won’t, because next week is a week off from school) those things will take the last two weeks of February, after which I’ll launch into REDEEMER.
My *plan* for that project is to go back through the synopsis and develop it to a much greater degree so that I have a really clean road map to follow. That’ll probably take a couple of weeks, but should make the actual writing a six to eight week project. My hope is to have a draft for Matrice by the middle of May, although that may be slightly too ambitious. I guess we’ll see. :)
ytd wordcount: 52,900 (woo broke 50K!)
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& that’s a wrap
I’ve just finished up the copy edits on STONE’S THROE, my Spirit of the Century pulp fiction novel for Evil Hat Productions. I believe it’ll be out to the backers in quite short order, and available for general purchase not *too* long after that.
I kinda love this book, guys. I think you will too. It’s full of ridiculous good swoopy pulpy fun, and I’m really glad I got a chance to write it.
And now I am going to go do the Ice Cream Dance of Celebration! :)
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the travails of writing
So a couple nights ago I sat down to work on STONE’S THROE and came to a moment when I needed to describe Amelia’s motorcycle. I went looking for a picture, and…well, I found one. Except it became clear as I read about it that the in-character-defined motorcycle…basically didn’t exist. Even in 1917. It was essentially a prototype, hand-built in 1909 by a kid in Italy to pursue a racing career. Over the next fifteen years or so he developed a line that went into mass production in the 20s and became quite a name by the early 30s…but in 1917, there was just no way Amelia was going to pick a bike like that up on the street in Paris.
After half an hour of increasingly dismayed research I emailed Fred and said does it have to be this kind of bike…? No, it didn’t, thank goodness, even if it’s established as such.
This is the kind of detail that I would normally skip to deal with later, because most of the time it’s not worth getting bogged down on something the big picture of the story can do without. Except I had no idea this time that when I went to look for a picture that it would lead down an extended research hole instead. Whoops. :)
I sure know a lot more about early-make motorcycles now than I ever expected to. :)
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a useless 3K
I wrote 3K on STONE’S THROE today. It’s basically entirely the wrong 3K, for reasons rather beautifully detailed here, by Jennifer Crusie. I’m basically writing until I get to the start of the story, at which point–
Well, if I’m lucky, at that point I’ll be able to work the backstory in as short flashback chapters, because the two stories ought to resonate with each other rather than being “Hi, here’s Story #1, there, now that’s over with and here’s Story #2.”
I am, however, a pretty linear writer most of the time, and this stuff happens first chronologically, so I’m writing it first. Also, it’s a wayy to get into the character’s head, which is always useful and in this case, enlightening to a degree which caused me to leave an incoherent Twitter post along the lines of OH GOD NO AMELIA OH NO THAT’S MUCH WORSE THAN I THOUGHT AUGH AGH AGLGHGH *writewritewritetofindoutwhathappens*!
If I’m absurdly lucky, it’ll come out to be about 6 or 7K in total, ie, 10% of the ideal book length, and I will be able to (probably massively revise rather than use as is, but) fit it back in. We’ll see.
In the meantime, I’m finding that Writing Pulp brings a totally different voice to my writing. I mean, it’s still clearly my writing, and I can see the things I’m doing to make it work that way, but I was somewhat concerned going in because I’m writing this in first person and I didn’t want it to end up sounding Walker-Papers-ish. Not, thus far, a problem.
Of course, it helps that in my head it’s Amelia speaking English as she might if French were her mother tongue (which is not strictly accurate, since in fact I imagine her to have three cradle languages: her mother’s Ethiopian, her father’s American English, and their common tongue, French), but thinking about how French people say things helps to inform my language choices here. Jo certainly doesn’t sound like that. :)
Also it’s easier to write descriptions when writing pulp. How’s that for interesting?
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SotC: Amelia Stone
I just want to observe that the SPIRIT OF THE CENTURY Kickstarter has crossed the $15K threshold, which means it is now actively moving toward “Catie writes a pulp fiction novel!”
Guys, it’s an insane bargain. If, in the goodness of your heart, you want to offer up twenty bucks, you get FIVE BOOKS and a warm fuzzy feeling, but the truth is you can get five books for ten dollars, which is just a preposterously good deal. And one of those books will be by me! :) (Because who are we kidding, does anybody think it’s *not* going to hit $20K?)