Carolyn's Blog

Monday, April 25, 2005

For good or ill, A Darker Crimson is done. Put a fork in it. It's all wrapped up and going Fed Ex tomorrow. Final word count: 96k. Oh, for crying out loud. I used up ALL my expensive bond paper and now that hateful voice is whispering to me, Hey, Carolyn, are you crazy? You could have had two more evenings to mess with word order and punctuation. Are you sure you shouldn't unwrap it and start over?

Anyway (mentally whistling to self) the changes I made to the end came out a lot better than I thought. (Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!) So, now it's late. I'm tired and going to bed.

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Friday, April 22, 2005

So, here it is my last weekend before ADC goes into the mail. Son has two soccer games Sunday 50-60 miles away. But I'm car pooling and will be able to work during the drive. Chances are good I'll get car sick. Still, basically, no Sunday. My brother is coming up this weekend. A high profile project needs to go in next week so I have to be at work. I have papers to grade for school. Have not even touched them. Arghh! I can think of about a bazillion details I need to fix and there's probably huge ones I forgot. And AND I started thinking I need to rework the back chapters a bit more radically. Without Sunday, I can't do radical. Plus, I have no freaking idea if the thing sucks or what. Sigh.

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Tuesday, April 19, 2005

Well, I have 94.4K so I guess that's good. But then I decided/realized? I needed to rework the ending. And that darn character who was supposed to have this tiny little part keeps showing up. The whole freaking thing still needs work because the new bits are brand-spanking new. And while I was doing that new stuff, I about tore my hair out because the flow wasn't what I needed. With the change, I had someone supposedly dying while everyone is 'splaining stuff or the other guy's doing the wolf thing (probaby he should bite somebody, for spite if nothing else.) and then suddenly the guy who's supposed to be dying is well enough to do stuff and then dying again. Can you spell BAD? So I fixed that by moving stuff to more sensible spots. I think it's OK. But mostly, I've been thinking to myself, yeah, my agent says she loved it, but since she made the mistake of signing me, doesn't she have to say that for at least this book because there's really no way to start over? Sometimes I make myself crazy.

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Sunday, April 17, 2005

So, been futzing around a bit, but I really want to mention that a while back a long time family friend mentioned that her 19 year old son had written a novel. Oh dear,I thought, as I agreed to read what he had. So, when he handed over the pages, I peeked at a sentence or two, just to get a sense of what sort of mess I might be in for. I got a chill. Holy %&$*! Was it possible he could really write? Hell yes.

So, this is my prediction. If he keeps at this, Mark Reynolds will win a Pulitzer some day. Hey, I was right about Toni Morrison and the Nobel.

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Saturday, April 16, 2005

92K. I cut an entire chapter and got rid of all the narrative my agent said was bogging things down. (She didn't say it was bogging things down, but that's what it was doing.) Once I started looking at the narrative she meant, I can recall thinking, well, maybe I can get away with it. The answer, no. This is precisely why writing is not a do-it-alone endeavor. Anyway, I saved the important parts from the chapter I cut, got them into the following chapter where they needed to be. Now when I read from chapter 14 straight to 16 without 15 in here bogging things down it's way better. Massively better. I cut some stuff I really, really liked. Sigh. But it's better to wave to them sitting there in the dead chapter section. I have no idea how I'm going to get myself back to 95K, but that's a worry for tomorrow.

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Thursday, April 14, 2005

I've done my first pass through the suggested fixes. Haven't redone the ending thingee for CK yet. At the gym today I worked out most of how to address issues with sprawl and a a few overused phrases. Anyway, tired. We'll see.

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Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Heard back from my agent. She read really fast! Between her and CK, I have a few things to address, but no Uh-oh, I'm going to have to change my name issues. Extremely helpful comments even if I did cringe at the stuff she pointed out that needed work. Of course she is right and I will fix. Sigh. I have two weeks. This puppy has to be done April 27 so I can get it to Fed-Ex on April 28 so it can arrive in NY Friday since the contractual deadline is on a Sunday. To work.

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Sunday, April 10, 2005

So. A Darker Crimson is all ready to go to my agent. And I've posted a bunch of stuff on my website. Chapter 1 is up, plus some pages about the series and the characters.

Whew! If you find a mistake, let me know. Thank goodness for css, though. Most of the look and feel changes for the Crimson City pages were a piece of cake. I just had to make a new style sheet and presto!

I can hardly believe I'm saying this, but I think the book is pretty freaking good. That's my story and I'm sticking with it until I start thinking about it too much. I did a search for words ending in LY and chopped 250 or so words off the MS. Then I did the same for a couple of verbs I thought I might be overusing. I was. But I tightened up the writing a lot.

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Saturday, April 09, 2005

So, I have 98K on A Darker Crimson, and Monday it gets overnighted to my agent so she can read it and tell me if I'm in big fat trouble. My impression now is that I am too close to tell any more. I think it might be pretty good, but what do I know? When I read the ending today it was not very good, but I think I fixed that. Oh. I need to look at my action items list and make sure I've covered everything. Oh, oops. I just remembered an important one. Gotta go do that.

Also, I forgot to mention that Christine Feehan spoke at my local RWA chapter meeting and she was fabulous. She talked about promoting for writers. I have pages and pages of notes and some good solid ideas about what to do and why.

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Wednesday, April 06, 2005

So, I'm actually up to 97+. Got reaction back from the reader. Am working on some tweaks. Some good points made and to be addressed. I have today, tomorrow and Friday off and I'll be working away. My chunk of change voices arrived the other day. Not perfect, but way, way way better than the free ones. Everything was going great (this is me: take son to soccer practice, park car in shade then sit in the back seat with the laptop until it's time to pick him up.) Anyway, all of a sudden the voice can't do contractions anymore. "wasn T" Very very irritating. I switched readers and the problem went away. If I can work through that, I'm a fan of reading back. It's way worth it.

My mother gave me some of my writing from high school. One of the stories was for SciFi/popular fiction (12 out of 10 points) I was writing romance even in HS. Sci Fi romance, but that's what it was. Here's the thing: I pick up the paper, and my first reaction was, Oh, no. What if this sucks? What if the teacher hated it? Even now, many many years later, I can't even bring myself to read through it because I know I'll start editing. The stupid thing is all those career tests etc schools give students said I should be an engineer, but in those days engineeering wasn't an acceptable career choice for girls. So, naturally, I majored in Political Science.

But, and I guess this is no surprise, I turned out to be a romance writer. I don't recall that being a career option.

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Monday, April 04, 2005

So, despite doing nothing yesterday, I've been having my chapters read back to me by some reading software and I'm catching a lot of typos and stuff that oops! doesn't make sense. The reading software is free, but the free voices are not so easy to listen to. They don't sound remotely real. But I've ponied up a chunk of change for a voice that, in the demo, sounded exactly real, and I'm anxiously waiting for that to arrive. Even with the lame voice, it's been very helpful.

In other writing technology news, social bookmarking is the next big thing. Blogging is only now catching on with writers. It's 2005 and I've been blogging here since 2001. Kind of slow adoption. Which suggests that social bookmarking will probably not catch on until 2009. I have 4 years to make my bookmarks awesome. I have some time off coming up so maybe I'll post to my website soon. That would be pretty cool. Actually, I can do it here Carolyn's Bookmarks. Check it out. This is my collection of writing related website. I'm about half way through. Click on one of the key words on the right in order to get a sense of what this does. Totally, totally cool.

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Saturday, April 02, 2005

I haven't done a lick of writing. Not any. Spent money getting son ready for soccer. The competitive team is expensive. We pay for uniforms (which won't arrive for at least 2 weeks, I understand) but they tell us they're expected to wear black shorts, black or white socks and a white t-shirt to practice which starts Monday. Fine for the kids who played last year. But last year, my son was rec soccer (red and blue!) not the traveling team. So I had to go buy stuff that, actually, I already bought (but won't get in time). Ouch. But he's so happy and thrilled to be on the Class 1 team.

His school is going on a Gold Country trip next week and he has to have pajamas suitable for cold weather. Uh-oh. He sleeps in his boxers. In part this is because we live in a part of California where people shiver when it hits 50 degrees. It's also because in the entire USA there are no pajamas for boys age 7-12. The few that I've seen in catalogs (no time for catalog shopping) have puppies and bulldozers on them. He's 9 for gosh sake's! What are these people thinking? There are hardly clothes for boys his age. It's worse if they're tall and skinny. Apparently, the 5 pairs of pants for boys that do exist are for boys who are chubby. Regular pants fall down on him. He needs slims. So, we had to try to find cold-weather pajamas in April. In California. There are none. There are also no sweatpants his size. Ever. Except in purple. I found a long-sleeved t-shirt that was on sale and some half-off lyrca-ish sport pants and told him if anyone asked to say they are pajamas. He's going to look like a Ninja. But he's excited about that, too, and so am I (about the trip, not the Ninja thing) because I'm taking those days off and will be home working.

So, anyway, no writing today at all. I surfed the web a lot. Played with social bookmarks. The next big tool. Probably Google will aquire this soon. Shopped. Wrote checks. Futzed with the website. But I'll notebook the new historical tonight. I'm looking forward to that.

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