, in comments wrt to Eddings’ death, said, And I can never forget Jim’s speech about the origins of the Codex Alera books: “Because all epic fantasy begins with an orphan on a farm.” Eddings is who I always associated with that. Which is true, and which makes me feel rather sentimental, and also makes me want to write an orphan-on-the-farm epic fantasy. Except I haven’t got as inherently cool a premise as Jim had for the Codex Alera books. Or, you know. Time. I seem to have walked almost…

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2 birds. 1 stone.

All right. I decided to upgrade Nook to an internet-capable computer, because I’m unwilling to give up the word wars (and because my birthday is Monday). But if I figured if I’m going to buy a new computer, I may as well buy something portable, because that way at least I can take my work with me very easily if I need/want to. Meet Nook 3.0: It’s a Samsung NC10 (sadly, not an NCC-1701), and it has, for sweet Christ’s sake, a 160 gig hard drive. I’m a *writer*. My…

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a-revisioning we go

348 page manuscript. Cut 32 pages wholesale. Have probably 50 or so to revise significantly by switching into the heroine’s POV, plus front-loading the story with essentially all-new material (some 30-50 pages of it all told, though not necessarily all in the front). Total expected major revision work, something like 70-100 pages. Minor revisions throughout to make the old stuff work with the new. And yet, delightfully, neither stressed nor panicked over all of this. Let’s hear it for not being behind the 8-ball. Got about 1.5 chapters actually revised,…

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cannot brain i have teh dumb

I think I have about a chapter and a half to go on this book. It is getting ever-slower. I have reached the Novelist’s Event Horizon. I’m coming to the conclusion that the last five chapters or so of any book is my least favorite part of writing it. For years now I’ve been skipping ahead and writing the last scene, and I now suspect that this is because I just want to get it over with and have some vague (if desperately wrong) hope that if I write the…

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nothin’ much

I have to say, I think there’s something to be said for this whole strange idea of “write 5 days a week and take 2 days off”. I had a very hard time getting started this morning (I do not find the ends of books easy to write, although you’d think they would be, since most of the work is done by that point), but I eked out twelve hundred or so words and then had a fairly decent set of wars. Aiming to finish the book by Friday (after…

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