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The middle of Octember.
These -ember months do seem to pile up rather quickly, don’t they? Last week I went away to the West Coast, spending some time with family. I don’t know what it is about me, but every single time I make a trip like that I somehow think I’m impervious to jet lag. The truth is, I’m terrible with jet lag. Eastbound is nuts. It’s almost been a week and I still haven’t acclimated, not even close. So the last few nights I’ve been up well past 2 AM, then up again at 3 AM with the little girl. So lucidity is not exactly my strong point at the moment. Anyway,…
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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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Glut, glut, glut.
I am trying to be candid here. I have too many words. Not counting finished drafts, I have somewhere around 230K of unfinished business. This is either work in process (currently I am writing two separate books) or words that need to be edited. This morning I thought I’d total it up, for reasons of amusement. But now? Looking at it I’ve got to wonder what the hell it is I’m getting at. This started when I got frustrated editing a first draft. Then I decided to do something else; which lead to something else… which means, ah, what the hell? Self: Stop this grumblefest. You need to look on…
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Writing with the darkness.
This week’s writing has been more difficult than others, and not because of the usual reasons (laziness, business, distractedness). While I’ve slowly made progress from 0k to 4K (about 2K from the chapter end) it’s been laborious, to say the least. Though I’m writing from a draft, I know what’s going to happen, so technically I shouldn’t be having issues. Except I am. And it’s all because it’s so damned dark. Fantasy tends to fall to either side of the extreme: light and hopeful, or dark and mournful. Or at least, it’s light peppered with enough dark that the contrast leaves you a bit heartbroken. And I have to blame…
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Ringing the WIP.
I’m working on something right now, something I started during my horrific cold the last few weeks. I’m purposely taking a bit of a break from AGC (no worries, Alderpod listeners; I have plenty of chapters yet to read, so y’all won’t notice the difference) to work on this WIP, which is a project I’ve actually been contemplating since I started my undergraduate career a decade ago (how did ten years pass?!). At that point, I’d written thousands of pages of writing, but had yet to complete a novel; that came years later, with the end of the YA novel, Peter of Windbourne (unpublished… may never see the light of…
