Recent Reads: Citadel of the Sky

Make room, GRRM: Chrysoula Tzavelas knows how to bring on the pain. I’ve just finished CITADEL OF THE SKY, which Chrysoula is in the midst of Kickstarting, and, like, whoa. This is not GRRM-style fantasy, let me make that clear. You don’t spend every turn of the page in fear that your protagonists are all going to be dead on the next one. It’s a cast of several, but not thousands. It’s also under 300 pages, which is like a quarter or a third of the length of a GRRM…

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I work a lot.

This morning as I was doing revisions on the 4th project I’ve worked on this month I had the shocking revelation that I work a lot. I can hear people rolling their eyes at me from all over the world right now, but it actually was a shock. I think it was because it was the fourth project (REDEEMER synopsis, MAGIC & MANNERS revisions, short story revisions, now SKYMASTER revisions) that I’ve worked on in the past 3 weeks that it really hit me. And if I get this done…

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I hate revising.

I hate revising. I particularly hate it when I’m going over a manuscript that, when I finished writing it, I thought was REALLY BAD and probably needed to be totally thrown out, and six weeks later when I look at it again I’m like “this appears to mostly work and i can’t tell if it actually works or if it’s just this HUGE GAPING BLIND SPOT OF DENIAL.” Even more aggravating is that the last 3 chapters of my printed manuscript mysteriously disappeared and so I was left in the…

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Small Gods

I was not a fan of Terry Pratchett. I read several of his very early Discworld books when I was still in high school, probably around 1988. The fact that I read *several* is more an indication of how much I read than how much I liked them, but I actually stopped reading them before I ran out of them to read, which *was* an indication of my dislike. It wasn’t Pratchett in particular; I eventually realised I didn’t care for most satire in prose form. In 1996 I was…

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whoosh!

MAGIC & MANNERS is off to the editor. I’ve lined up a copy editor, the cover artist is working on the cover art (as she can; poor woman broke her arm!), and I’ve got a couple people I need to talk to about book layout. I also need…to think about what I’m doing with ISBNs, and I need to grit my teeth and delve into the Ingrams system, as I don’t see myself suddenly being flush enough with cash to hire someone to deal with that for me, much as…

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