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up early
For some ungodly reason* I woke up at 6:19 this morning, and after a desultory lying-about for half an hour or so, got up and went for a 4.5 mile walk around swimming.
I came home to an email full of character sketches for a graphic novel idea I’m developing with artist Lanny Liu, some of which were so perfect they made me laugh. There’s nothing quite like sending pages full of words off to someone and getting pages full of pictures back. :)
Then I finished reading the first of Laura Anne Gilman‘s Vineart War books, FLESH & FIRE, which you don’t get to read until October, but which you will want to then. I thought the conceit was terrific–a world in which magic is the Vineart, based in grapes and wines–when she blogged about it (what must have been forever ago although it seems very recent). She’s not only done the idea justice, but has made the process fascinating (even to me, who actively dislikes wine!). And now I am kind of staring at my watch going “Ok, I know she’s writing the next book during the word wars as soon as she gets finished with revisions on that other book of hers, how can I hurry this along?”
Some days this job doesn’t suck. :)
I’ll be late for word wars today, because I said to the tattooing hairdresser man that any time today was fine for a haircut appointment and he chose 2pm, which of course isn’t really the best time for me, but at that point I didn’t care.
miles to Minas Tirith: 263.5
*The ungodly reason would be having been asleep before 10:30 last night due to sheer physical exhaustion.
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just doin’ the job
So I got revision notes on THE PRETENDER’S CROWN from my agent, the estimable
/Jennifer Jackson a couple of days ago. The first screen (which was all I read at the time) wasn’t too terrible (I have gotten *really* gun-shy about revision letters since the one that obliged me to *completely* rewrite HOUSE OF CARDS), so today I held my breath and looked at the rest of it. Really not dreadful at all, except perhaps for the part where she said, “Around page 250 I thought, hm, this is slow getting started. I think, ideally, you might cut about 100 pages from the first chunk and then we’d really have something.”
This is essentially what she said about HEART OF STONE. (Actually, there, she said, “Here, rewrite this completely,” then read the rewrites and said, “Great! Now cut another 30 pages from the first 100, and we’ll really have something.”) And she was right.
I suspect she’s right about this, too. She had a couple of bits where she specifically said, “I think this part went on too long,” which is *insanely* helpful from an editing point of view. Just a “here, look at this part” makes it *so* much easier for me to suddenly go oh, oh, yeah, okay, I can see how that could get cropped down. So now I’m actually all excited about the book again, and looking forward to trying to tackle that behemoth. Which means I must be all excited about writing this Walker Papers book, because it would be good to have it done before I have to turn my attention to TPC. And strangely enough, it kinda works. I’m feeling zingier about writing, and that’s always good.
Days like today, this job doesn’t suck. Yay!