Magic & Manners crowdfund

I mentioned this on various social media yesterday, but I’m still thinking about it now, so I’ll post here with more thought and detail. I’m enormously enjoying writing MAGIC & MANNERS, my Pride-and-Prejudice-with-magic pastiche, and I’ve been contemplating what to do with it. I’d like to keep going, but being a writer, I’d also like to get paid for my words (crazy, I know!). I’m also particularly enjoying the whole no-particular-deadline aspect, which means I don’t know that I want to sell it traditionally right now, or even do a…

Continue Reading

boom: it’s a draft

Ten days and 35K later, STONE’S THROE can be called a draft. It’s a god-awful mess and needs serious revision, but the draft is done and the rest can be fixed. By Wednesday. @.@ Actually, there are parts of the book I’m happy with, and it came in at the wordcount I was aiming for, so I’m okay with that. And, er, I actually find that having finished it, I’m kind of hoping for the chance to write The Further Adventures of Amelia Stone, so I guess we’ll just have…

Continue Reading

a quoteable morning

It’s been a pretty quoteable morning around here. First my son and I were playing superheroes and he said to me, “Who is in that Iron Man armor?” I said, “Tony Stark, and he, quite reasonably, wanted to know who Tony Stark was. I said, “A philanthropist playboy billionaire genius.” Young Indiana said, “Like me?” Just like you, honey. Just like you. <3 :) Then over on Twitter, Alastair Reynolds (‏@AquilaRift), whom I like a lot as both a writer and a person, said, for some reason, that he won…

Continue Reading

mutter.

I do not want to be writing. :p I’m pretty sure that this is more because I’ve done about 15K in the past 3 days and yet somehow I’m Still Not Done than it is about having messed the book up (often not wanting to write means I’ve done it wrong, but in this case I think my butt is just numb and is affecting my brain), but man, I don’t want to write. So part of my brain is trying to tempt me with Other Projects (“It’ll be more…

Continue Reading

my best(worst) critique ever

Back at the start of the century (!) I submitted a manuscript to a writing contest, which I finaled in and went to the conference the contest was associated with, because finalists got to meet an editor and I wanted a professional opinion on whether what I was doing was any good. Finalists also wore little ribbons saying they were finalists in their genre. The SF/F ones were yellow. A woman came up to me and said, “Oh! You’re a SF&F finalist! Were you one of mine? I’m one of…

Continue Reading