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I have an announcement…
Today is September 22nd, which happens to be the birthday of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, give or take. And while this day is perfect for gorging on cheese and mushrooms, taking walks in the park among the trees, and starting adventures, it’s also a good one for announcements (or so I’d like to think). No. I am not disappearing. I have no magic rings, and even if I did own one, I’d probably have lost it by now or else left you entirely. I’m far too much of a Took to let a ring sit in an envelope for years. The announcement is this: I have sold my first book!…
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Picture yourself on a boat on a river…
I’m not terribly with it at the moment, but things are improving. Quite obviously I made it through the surgery, and after reacting horrifically to the anesthesia (I think I was actually throwing up before I woke up) I went home. For the time being I’m staying with my parents, and trying to rest. Really most of my day revolves around sleep. But hey, the body heals best in that state, so there you go. Right now it’s a matter of mitigating pain, which is, at times, pretty astonishingly intense. Yay for drugs. Other than that, I’m trying to catch up on some movies I haven’t seen in a while,…
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Weird Tales Uncanny Beauty Issue
I’ve been waiting to talk about this until it was official but, hey, look: official! And awesome. I had the privilege of coming up with a project together with Brigid Ashwood, a brilliant artist and fellow lover of speculative fiction. The piece in the upcoming issue is entitled “The Wakened Image” and it’s a look at some of the “made” women in mythology, taken from the Mabinogion and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Brigid helped me brainstorm the subject, and then I wrote a three-part poem in blank verse; Brigid provided some astonishingly beautiful pictures to accompany the text. The issue isn’t available yet, but soon. I’ll keep you posted. I am so…
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The Great Inbetween
Oh hai. Yes, I have a blog. Sometimes I write in it. Right now for instance. Yeah, been busy. BUSY. Busy with stuff I can’t yet share with the world; some writing related (in the speculative sense), some blogging related. All busy related. So far, there hasn’t been time for much new writing. I have yet to catch novel fever on any one idea, but do have some projects I am trying to work on, anyway. Even if they are being difficult. I’ve had a few ideas that I’d like to pursue, but at the moment I’m sitting on a half dozen novels and feel, rightly so I think, that…
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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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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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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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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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It’s not fun until someone loses an eye.
I grossed myself out today during writing. I don’t know if it’s because the AC is broken and it’s 90 degrees up here and the humidity is through the roof, but I apparently needed to outdo myself in fiction. It was one of those weird moments where I’d planned for the scene to go one way and it took a sharp, brutal detour in a direction I hadn’t anticipated. Like the title says, someone literally loses an eye in the process. Of his own volition. I can get away with a bit that I normally couldn’t in Dev’s narrative, because he’s on this Dante-esque journey. I’ve got to hit some…
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This is the last time.
Writing has been slow since my birthday when, as a promise to myself, I scaled that 60K mark. Huzzah! But yeah, that was on the 14th of June, and here we are more than a week later and just cresting 62K. I have excuses, but really I don’t. It should be more. Anyway, I did add that other POV in, and I’m enjoying her presence immensely. It’s helping to tie some of the plot loose ends a little more tightly together and giving a bit of needed comic relief. She’s a clever one, that Dinah Montpre, but she’s also selfish and self-centered. It’s quite the combination. She also has virtually…
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Finding the power in rejection.
I would be a liar if I told you that rejection doesn’t matter, that every time a short story market or an agent lets me know my work isn’t for them, I don’t sulk a little. This last year rejection has set the tone for just about everything in my writing world. While I’ve had some agents express interest in future work of mine, I haven’t found a fit with The Aldersgate nor have I heard back from the editor who’s had it for almost a year. I haven’t talked about either of these things on my blog, really at all, though I’ve hinted at it. Searching for agents is…
