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Homesick for fiction.
Having finished the draft of Indigo & Ink, which has occupied the last seven months of my life, I’m now feeling a bit down in the dumps. You know, I really miss writing the book. After that last edit, I had a sense of finality, and while it was very thrilling, in some ways it also left me feeling a bit empty. This probably explains why when my friend Karen mentioned she’d read some of the first chapter, I about fell out of my chair in excitement. Yes, writers are weird. If you hadn’t figured that out yet, you just haven’t met enough of us. Anyway, I haven’t stopped writing,…
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Draft One, Deeper Into the Murk
So, no longer Draft Zero, eh, Indigo & Ink? This is where things get interesting. I’m not one of those people who can let a book draft sit for terribly long. Okay, wait, no. That’s a lie. I can let it sit plenty after I’ve edited the crap out of it, but otherwise it pokes at my consciousness for days until I fix what needs fixing. We can’t always be as disciplined as Stephen King, and if we all wrote the same the world would be boring (or… something?). When I finished Indigo & Ink, I was in the zone, so I decided to keep going. The draft, at one…
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NASFiC Schedule!
I’m a panelist at NASFiC, here in Raleigh, and I’ll be at the Bull Spec #2 launch party on Wednesday. In other words, I am painting the town squid ink black (as opposed to red, since it’s… more speculative? Um, I don’t know.) At any rate, if you are at ReConStruction, here’s where you can find me: GLB 008 – Is The Mainstream Ready for GLBT?- 08/05 @ 8:00pm MIS009j – Reading! Where I’ll Read Stuff Which Is Clearly Not the Actual Title – 08/06 3:00pm LIT 004 – Fantasy Environments – 08/06 5:00pm LIT 031 – The Worst Future You Can Imagine or Have Written About – 08/07 –…
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Draft Zero? Oh Yes!
Indigo & Ink is officially moving from Scrivener to Pages. What does that mean? Why, draft zero has been achieved! So I ended up more than my original plan, but hey. That’s what drafts are for, right? Unexpected things happen. I thought at one point I might not even get to 90k. But this book, well, it’s got a mind of its own. Just like the Mother Squid. Anyway, this book has been very important for me to finish for a number of reasons. Things haven’t been great on a lot of fronts, but this story needed to be told. And I did it. In spite of the crap that’s…
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The State of Things: Bull Spec Magazine
Today I had the pleasure of being on The State of Things, a show hosted by Frank Stasio on WUNC, along with Samuel Montgomery-Blinn (the editor of Bull Spec), John Kessel, Richard Dansky, and Paul Celmer. We talked a great deal about speculative fiction (with leanings toward science-fiction) and touched on steampunk, technology, the line between reality and fiction, women writing in the genre, and how the genre is changing. You can even hear a version of my short flash piece, “Sand” that was put together especially for the episode. You can find the whole transcript here! Ah, the magic of the internet. It was quite the experience–even though I’ve…
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Beach. Book. Bed.
Just returned today from nearly a week on the North Carolina coast. There was not much writing time to be had, but plenty of time to think of writing. I think I’ve worked out the last three or four chapters sufficiently. It’s a melancholy end for a melancholy book, though there’s more humor in it than anything I’ve written to date (which is terribly important given the subject matter, I say). Being at the beach was perfect for the plotting, what with the sea air and the sunsets and all. Last night I stood on the porch and watched a huge thunderstorm over the Atlantic ocean–the largest lightning bolts I’ve…
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Just some metrics and a whole lotta words.
So apparently I wrote about 8K today. For some reason I’m almost embarrassed to admit that. I really have done little else but write today! Ass in chair, indeed. Um. Yeah. I call this “end of novel fever” and occasionally it strikes. I’m just glad my fingers are holding up… but not for long. It’s bedtime for me, and man… yeah. I said something a few posts about being surprised if I hit 90K. Well, um. I’m surprised. But it is coming to a close. Sort of. Sometimes characters have little side quests they have to finish, and no matter how much you try to talk them out of it…
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Aqueduct Press Highlight – 50-6-1, via Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer says: I don’t know if readers realize this, but Aqueduct has reached the 50-book mark in just their sixth year. That’s a significant achievement for any press–both the longevity and the quantity, not to mention the quality and the focus. Not to mention that Duchamp is a class act as a publisher dealing with writers. Jeff also conducted a full interview with founder L. Timmel Duchamp, who has many great things to say about her inspiration behind the press. I particularly like this bit: When I started Aqueduct, two thoughts dominated my thinking: first, that mainstream publishers were for complicated reasons passing up excellent books that needed to…
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Enter title here…
I’ve been going back and forth with the title thing on this book for the last week, really and truly frustrated that I couldn’t get something that felt right. So today during dinner (no, we were not eating calamari – it was gazpacho and sausages!) the name struck. Indigo and Ink. Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner. Finally something that speaks to two of the main themes of the book and, in my mind, has a rather neat ring to it. And, at least with a cursory search on Google, no other books of the same name. Dark and squiddy. I like it that way. I feel better now.
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Titles, Tentacles, and Trust
Explosition: in a narrative, the presence of excessive exposition. i.e. expository barf Well, 80K has been surpassed. This is good. This is very good. And as I plunge into the last few chapters, I’m realizing I do have more to say in this space. So I’m thinking the draft will be around 95K now… give or take. I have a tentative new title: Mother’s Ink. Or Inkwell. It’s become the center of the story, really (ink that is), and has even lent itself to my own version of the undead. (This is momentous! I’ve never had the undead in a novel before. I feel like I might have leveled as…
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Squid Pro Quo – 70K and the State of Things
Chapter: Found Two Things I Loved: It’s an Ash chapter, so that’s always a blast. He’s the easiest of the POV’s for me to get into (no idea why, it’s not like we’re anything alike) and there’s always that unexpected element with him. Two best points of the chapter are probably his command over the crazy situation (as someone has come into their midst with a squidling implant) and then his horror at the extraction process. I like the contrast, makes the character so much more three-dimensional. Hell, Ash is probably multi-dimensional. Two Things I Loathed: I’m pretty happy with where this chapter is going, but I have A Big…
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On pursuing passion.
I started writing novels at a very young age, finding a remarkable amount of solace in the power of creation. That’s not to say that the writing was good, or even passable, but it was practice. And in those early years passion was the sole driving force behind my imagination. It was far before I ever had an understanding of literary markets, agents, publication. I spent hours, days, bent over the keyboard, creating. There was never a doubt in my mind; I knew I was doing the right thing, the only thing that I was meant to do. When I was young, I had every confidence in the world. Passion…
