Thursday, November 29, 2007
Can you say -- well never mind, it's not polite
Right. I have the joy of a cold. But I'm feeling better than I did yesterday or this morning. At least I can breathe through my nose.
The Great Title Search is coming down the to wire. I think my agent and I have sent close to a hundred suggestions. No exaggeration. They would like to put flames or fire on the cover somehow, which actually sounds pretty cool, so they want a title that suggests fire. They'd also like an active title, so we need a verb of some sort. This is actually much, much harder than it seems. They need a title by tomorrow. That would be Friday, November 30.
Ack!!Don't think I got much work done on Scandal today. Rats. I will be busting my butt this weekend.
Labels: Book Covers, Book Titles, Scandal, writing
(2) comments
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Early Exhaustion
I'm exhausted so I'm doing an early post. That allows me to build up a good level of anxiety
before I start working as well as fall straight into bed when I'm done for the night. Which may be early. At lunch time I started writing the new chapter and it went OK. Then on the drive home I thought of this totally better setting that for it. Yay! I'm going to go do that.
Labels: Scandal, writing
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Monday, November 26, 2007
Frantic x 2
Working on Scandal, of course. I reordered some chapters and have blocked out a new one, which I was hoping to write tonight, but re-setting the chapters took longer than I hoped.
My editor at Grand Central Publishing loved Magellan's Witch. I'm confirmed for an August 2008 release, which means they're fast tracking everything. They need a new title by the end of this week and some minor revisions ASAP. Urk. I can do it though. The revisions aren't big, I can probably get through them in a day. But that will have to wait for the weekend. I hear the cover will be on the sexy side, photographic as opposed to artwork which sounds pretty cool to me.
If you have a title suggestion, send it on. I have a contest going (which you would know already if you were a newsletter subscriber hint hint) If you send a suggestion, you're in the contest.
Off to bed.
Labels: Book Titles, Magellan's Witch, Scandal
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Sunday, November 25, 2007
where does the time go?
I actually have the answer. Time flies because it's a hurry to join all your lost socks. They put on a great party, you see. And whenever time seems like it's slowing down? That's what happens when someone discards all their onesie-socks. The time-space continuum flexes when the missing socks are returned to the poor fool. Inevitably some other schmuck gets stuck in one of the creases. For him, or her, time inexplicably slows. This is most noticeable at the dentist's office or fifteen minutes before it's time to go home from someplace boring. Mostly we don't notice. But it happens, I assure you.
What, you never read
A Wrinkle in Time? I'm sure that was in there.
Working on Scandal. Not looking forward to going back to the day job.
And sorry, despite the tag, this post has nothing to do with Navy SEALs. I just wish it did because that would be better than just about anything, including fixing that wretched chapter 8. Plus, you know, why not think about Navy SEALs now and again? I'm sure it's good for me.
Labels: editing, Navy SEALs, Scandal, writing
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The draft is complete
I finally pounded out my replacement chapter and despite the original's deletion ended up almost 1200 words ahead. Not to mention at 80K words. Which is within spitting distance of done. Tomorrow, more editing -- or, technically, later today, more editing. No fork yet, but maybe some soft trumpets?
Well, whatever, I'm going to bed on a happier note than I expected.
Labels: Scandal, writing freaking writing
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Saturday, November 24, 2007
A Whole New Chapter
Literally, I'm afraid. It's the next to last chapter of Scandal and I knew there were some issues because my outline contained the words
This is a mess. Fix it. So yeah. The fix was to start completely over.
Sigh. Had to happen. It's going slow, because, like, has anything about Scandal EVER gone quickly? Answer: No.
So, yeah. I'm procrastinating like heck. But it's getting done. Slowly.
Back to it.
Labels: polishing, Scandal, writing
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Friday, November 23, 2007
Friday. Now it seems like you came TOO soon!
Well, golly. I've been working away at Scandal. It's going sloooooww. So, now it seems like Friday came too soon because I could use another few days before the weekend and back to work. Anyway, got to work. Hopefully I'll post again later in the evening or something.
Labels: Scandal, writing
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Wednesday, November 21, 2007
On Being Thankful
Tomorrow is the American holiday of Thanksgiving so I wanted to take a few minutes to talk about the things I'm grateful for.
- I am grateful for my son. He's the joy of my life.
- I'm grateful for my friends of so many years, Peter and Jennifer in particular, whom I've known since my undergrad days at UC Berkeley. It's amazing to have friendships that have lasted more than 20 years now.
- I'm also grateful for my writing friends; sometimes I feel like they know me best. With them I don't have to worry that they don't understand the things that being a writer does to your head.
- I'm grateful to have been taught the importance of speaking out when something is wrong. I don't talk about it much, or at all on this blog, but I have spoken out on the things I believe are desperately wrong with my county.
- I'm grateful for musicians and artists who bring beauty to my life.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone.
Labels: Thanksgiving
(4) comments
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Technology, Readers and Writers
Big
"news
" in the tech-blogosphere about Amazon's Kindle eBook reader. Here's two links to check out if you want:
Booksquare analysis and
Sandy Schwab's post on the subject.
Here's my take:
What a colossal mistake. Again. Boy, I hope somebody gets this right someday. But acting like a cell phone company ain't going to sell your gadget. Why would anyone do that? People already despise their cell phone carriers for overpriced and underperforming technology designed to rip you off -- because they can.
I remember reading a while back, can't remember where, that someone attending an O'Reilly conference, who happened to be a techie and Romance reader, challenged the assumptions about the assumed market for eBooks and eBook readers. The Techies, being basically ignorant about reading and publishing, assumed it's men and refused to believe the truth about women and their reading habits. Alas. What a missed opportunity.
Here's a few facts to set the scene of this fiasco:
Women buy most books. Women also buy the most eBooks. Let me direct any non-believers to
Ellora's Cave See also
eHarlequin, their Spice offerings in particular. I've bought from Ellora's Cave. Typically, I download my eBooks in pdf, print them two book pages per page, and double-sided (I love my printer!) stick them in a binder and read in bed. Since I'm a writer, if I read on a computer, my head is in editing mode...
So, I read a bit about the Kindle and here were my thoughts pretty much in order:
- $400?? Are they out of their effin minds?1
- It's ugly
- Black and white? That sucks
- No pdf? Are they out of their effin minds?
Plus, it's too big. But maybe that wouldn't matter so much if it weren't so ugly. Still how is that thing going to fit in my purse, to be brought out at moments of downtime (waiting in line, appts, lunchtime, boring events.) Booksquare is right. The only color for a device that people are going to carry around and push buttons on is black. Or at least dark colors that hide grime. Quick, what color is your keyboard. Take a good look at it. That's what your reader will look like in 5 months, only worse.
And then I moved on. I'm not going to pay that kind of money for DRM'd crap that won't load formats provided by the REAL eBook pubs (and Amazon, sorry, that's not you) If this device were say, $200 or less, it took pdfs and html, even if the display was B&W, I could load up all my eBooks, probably including my grad school research (oh, my god!! wouldn't that be awesome? Research at my fingertips!!) Hell, I could even pdf my own WIPs. All my Regency Library stuff why, the mind boggles... See, that's what's missing from the Kindle, that, oh my gosh, look at all the stuff I could do with that! My life would be better if I had that. Only it wouldn't be.
So to sum up, no one at Amazon seems to have thought about talking to actual readers or publishers, with or without eBook experience. They have a gadget and can only think that gadgets are for men. (I'm guessing here.) But at RWA in NY, which was what, 2002? 2004?, there were women there reading eBooks on their PDA's. Because the ePubs were already successfully selling eBooks
2. But PDA's were not the right gadget -- plus, too expensive.
1. If I had $400 to burn, I'd get an iPhone.
2. In those days, EC looked like a promising venture, but it was by no means certain. Fast Forward a few short years. NY is copying EC. They proved eBooks work.
Amazon, you blew it.
Labels: reading
(2) comments
Monday, November 19, 2007
Snail's Pace
I wrote a lot tonight, but then I got to an older chapter and had to cut a bunch so my net word gain is only a couple hundred. But, the old stuff has to make way for the new. Tired. Looking forward to some time off, during which I will probably ignore my family as much as I possibly can so I can write.
Edited to add: I forgot, today I was sitting staring into the ether and suddenly I was channeling
Patti O'Shea because my heroine for the next book started talking to me. OK, like I don't know how it happens with Patti, but I know the character wasn't really talking to me, despite my being more than happy to listen, but there she was in my head and I knew all kinds of stuff about her that I didn't before. She will be referred to as
FH which stands for
Female Heroine until somebody coughs up a name. She kind of kicks ass.
Storywise, Scandal is done, so I don't have any notebooking to do. Just writing, freaking writing, which I did a lot of tonight notwithstanding the low word count. I think I have two maybe three chapters to get through before I can even think of some one reading it raw.
OK, off to bed.
Labels: Next Book, Scandal, writing
(2) comments
Sunday, November 18, 2007
The weekend's ended. Rats.
Today was a very busy day. I slept later than I wanted to but given my typical sleep deficit, it's probably a good thing. The Darling Child spent the night at his uncle's house (that would be
Uncle Geography for readers of this blog) so I worked all morning but wasn't as productive as I hoped. Then I had to go shopping and then make cookies because today was the DC's end of League Play party, and I said I'd make cookies. Then I had to call the uncle to bring the DC home, and off to the party. And, the party was pretty fun, there were parents this year who like to talk about literature! One of the parents had met Michael Chabon. Whoa. Golly, I love talking about books so for once I wasn't standing around feeling like a dork. The kids had a good time, they ran around outside and when it was too dark to see they came in all sweaty and hot and ready for cake.
When we came home I got some good work done, though.
Now I just get to buckle down and polish and hopefully have time to send it out for outside reading.
What else? Nothing. I have to go to work tomorrow and that's always kind of depressing, especially when I wish I had 10K more words than I do. Although, come to think of it, I always wish that. And the words I have I've beginning to suspect are quality. Let's hope.
Labels: editing, Scandal, writing
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Saturday, November 17, 2007
In Which Things Get a Little Better
Tonight, I wrote my ending chapter. It needs a little work, but it's there where yesterday there was nothing. I also made back the word count I lost from cutting the two sucky chapters yesterday. Yay for me. I have one or two more chapters that I know need some work. I hope to get that done tomorrow. And then I'll have a crappy draft. But, as every writer knows, crap can be fixed.
In other news, my brother was supposed to come over to give my son a man-to-man talk that would reinforce
The Talk that I've had with him about S. E. X. I consider this especially important now that girls have discovered him. So, pretend for a minute, that this girl who is interested in my son and who my son is (supposedly) just friends with has a name that sounds like the capital of a country. This is true. Pretend that it's Paris. Her name isn't Paris, but pretend. My brother's conversation with my son went like this:
Uncle: Hey, I hear you really like France.
Son: Yeeahhh. Why?
Uncle: I hear one city in particular is your favorite.
Son: What?
Uncle: Yeah, it's the capital of France. Paris.
Son: (whispering to self) I gotta talk to my mom.
I am not kidding. I was in the kitchen at the time, and I overhead it and while I may not have the exact words, this is pretty darn close. I did not ask my brother to talk to my son about geography. We have an enormous map of the world on the wall in the hallway. My son and I often stand in front of that map and talk about geography. He's actually very good at geography.
The conversation should have gone like this:
Uncle: Never have sex. But if you do, use a condom. You know what a condom is, right?
Son: Yeeahhh. Why?
Uncle: Do you know how to use one?
Son: Umm.
Uncle: [Manly talk that women never hear, but that conveys respect for women and mastery over the use of birth control.]
Son: Thank you. But I'm going to listen to my mom and never have sex.
Geography. Oh, for crying out loud.
Labels: editing, Geography, Scandal, writing
(0) comments
The Nerve! Honestly.
Now, as some of you may already know, I have a lot of fun with my
MySpace Page. I've met some great people, readers, artists, photographers, musicians and even a writer or two. Sometimes I find myself with two copies of a book and I've sent off the extra to one of my MySpace friends. So it's been just really fun. I don't mind friending writers, sometimes I'm kind of giddy.
Barry Eisler friended me!! So, you know, yay! and all that.
But when a writer leaves me a comment that is an nothing more than an ad for their new release? That's spam. That's despicable. That's no different from those stupid, spammy here's a new ringtone for you (that probably hits some server in China all ready with malware, just for me!) comments.
I have no problem with getting MySpace email from writers announcing releases. Hey, that's why I friended them. I often click on bulletins announcing releases. But I don't want your spam comment. If you want to sell something, go use your own site. Don't try inserting an ad on
MY MySpace page. I'm so glad I turned on comment moderation, because that spam comment never made it to my page. I denied it. And I'll deny any one else who tries it too.
If you're a writer, please, don't do that. I'll un-friend you and hate you, too.
OK, back to work on Scandal.
Labels: bad marketing, Scandal, writing
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Friday, November 16, 2007
Bad Poetry Day (no, there's no meter)
Panic, how do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.
You turn my stomach into a rock
When I'm cutting pages.
(Don't worry, that clunk is just the sound of bad writing when it hits the worm hole to the bad writing universe behind my monitor)You're the ice that runs down my spine
When I play
whack a chapter.(Once yesterday, twice today!
Whack!
Whack! Whack!
At the gym!)That squiffy feeling in my elbows?
That's you, Panic.
All that writing that came from nowhere
And might even be halfway decent?
1That's from you too.
But I still don't love you.
1. If you're not, you're going into the same black hole you came out of. And yeah, that's a threat and a promise. Try not to Panic about it.Labels: Bad Poetry, Scandal, worm holes, writing freaking writing
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Thursday, November 15, 2007
Forecast:: Same as Yesterday
I cut 15 pages tonight.
Had to. It was boring.
Labels: panic, Scandal, writing
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Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Progress Report -- Panic with a Chance of Hysteria
Things are developing as I edit like crazy. Trying to combine a read-through with regular editing. At least I get a lot done during soccer practice. It's not been cold at all lately, so I'm OK sitting in the back seat with the laptop. Very few distractions.
Any hoo - I need titles for the novel formerly known as Magellan's Witch. Fiends. Mages. Witches. They all hate each other. People fall in love anyway. Warlord Fiend. Witch who can't use her magic. They shouldn't get together but they do. Any and all suggestions appreciated.
Labels: Book Titles, editing, Magellan's Witch, Scandal, writing
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
still working
Not much to report. Still working on Scandal. It's going OK. Just not fast enough.
Labels: Scandal writing
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Friday, November 09, 2007
Picture This
I wish a had a picture but I don't. I had to do some day job stuff tonight. But at home, there's no bandwidth, so I have to drive to a Starbucks, buy some tea and use their internet. So, picture this:
Carolyn arrives at Starbucks with two laptops and two mobile phones. One for work, one for me. I get my tea and sit down and begin to set up the command center. The work laptop is on the table, eventually VPN'ed to work and connected to the first server I need to work on. My work phone (a smart phone that does REAL email) is next to it waiting for the go ahead call. My laptop is on a chair and I am typing away on Chapter 19 while I wait for the phone to ring... I got some good work done on chapter 19 actually. A small but huge bit of work that brings things together nicely.
The work phone rings. It's a go. I kick off SQL job number one and then transfer a file from one server to another. During the file transfer, I go back to working on Chapter 19. When the transfer is done, I disconnect from the COLO facility and connect to my work domain and then connect to the next server. I kick off that SQL job and while I wait for that to finish I fish out my phone, call the pizza place and order a Margarita for my son's dinner. Then I go back to work on chapter 19. When the job is done, I grab the work phone, call the work guy and tell him to check while I back up my Chapter 19 and start to shut down my laptop. All is hunky dory so I can also disconnect the work laptop, pack up and go pick up the pizza.
Come home, feed the child, shoot the breeze with said child, and wonder if I should ask him about the girl who keeps texting him and who he texts back. Too controlling, I decide. They're
just friends he says. I've been told by parents of other boys that I must understand this is not necessarily the exact truth. Uh-oh. We've had
The Talk but now I need my brother to have
The Talk with him, too. Just to make sure.
Oh, and part of the reason for this post is to demonstrate that writing time can be found anywhere. I did some important work there, and I was only there 45 minutes. So no whining about time for writing. If you're a writer, you find the time. More likely, the time finds you, because that's what you're looking for. Those moments when you can write. If you don't look for them and use them, you may never finish your book.
In 45 minutes I drank some green tea, worked at day job stuff, ordered dinner for the child, and made important progress in chapter 19.
Just saying.
Apparently, I can't get over the Whiner from Grad School. Honestly. (TWFGS couldn't find time to write because she couldn't write during lunchtime at work because it was too noisy, and outside at work was too distracting and the car was too whatever, and she had schoolwork and a boyfriend and SO much reading to do. Right. Oh, please. But I'm sure none of you are that way. Right?)
Labels: Scandal, writing, writing time
(3) comments
Thursday, November 08, 2007
heading into the weekend
With Scandal, I feel like I'm sliding into editing which is always more fun than the writing. I have a chapter to redo tonight, so we'll see what happens to the word count. I'm at about 75,500, so I'm not too worried. I'm only worried about crap and getting it fixed.
I got some preliminary cover copy for Magellan's Witch. Wow! Sounds a like a great story! They want to change the title, to which I say,
Thank goodness! I was never all that wild about MW, but it worked OK enough. Only now I need to come up with some title ideas, some that lend themselves to a series Ishouldbesolucky. I have no ideas whatever. Zero. My head's in Scandal. Anybody got any suggestions?
Which Witch is out. So is
The Little Witch Who Couldn't. So are
The Fiend Who Loved Her,
Fiends and Lovers,
Big Bad Boys Who Aren't Human,
No Fluffy Bunnies Here. . . I'm a wealth of unhelpfulness to myself. Somebody save me.
Labels: Book Titles, Magellan's Witch, Scandal
(0) comments
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
My Cup of Tea
My son's school did this fund-raising thing that involves holding parents up at guilt-point and forcing them to buy stuff that costs too much for what you get. (sarcasm alert) But the kids get prizes!! -- that are broken five minutes later or else unusable straight from the plastic bag (which is NOT a toy, by the way) and (sarcasm over) now I have to report on one of my purchases. It's a visual report, too. Grin.
I bought this coffee mug, see, but the surface is a chalkboard. So if the cheap chalk that comes with it was any good, you could write stuff on it over and over. Like this:
Yeah, it's kind of hard to read, but I wrote
I am not a rat -- Banallt on one side and
Yes, you are -- Sophie on the other because that's the essence of my hero and heroine in Scandal. Or you could write other stuff. Which I'll do tomorrow. It's kind of fun.
In writing news, even though the above qualifies as writing news, Scandal is going almost all right. I've fought my way through several chapters, reordered several more and am reasonably pleased with the result. I wrote two new ones, which was good because I deleted a bunch of crap, too. Now I'm closing in on the ending. I'm hoping that by next week sometime I'll have a crappy but complete draft and a month to tear it apart and put it back together. It's funny how I always have an ending in mind but it keeps slipping away; like a wave, it's there, and then it's gone and I keep trying to pin it in place and I just can't. Then somewhere around 60 or 70 thousand words I realize that the ending of my story is actually in the
"middle
" (those are air quotes, by the way) and all the time I've been spending stressing over the fact the my middle is moving further and further away from the actual middle just means the
"middle
" is actually more like the end. Which is what happened with Scandal two days ago. My outline had an ending blocked out, a good thing because it gave me a direction, but the book would have to be 175,000 words in order to get there. And then I realized I'd already written everything but the end, which was just at a different place than I thought. And it's a gosh-darned relief, too.
Back to work.
Labels: endings, plotting or the lack thereof, Scandal, writing
(0) comments
Monday, November 05, 2007
Reporting In Grumpily
I admit it. I'm grumpy right now. First off, my web host, which hosts two domains of mine, including this one, moved their operations to a new facility. I
knew when I heard about it that it would not go smoothly. And it didn't. My writing site was down from Saturday night to some time this morning. There was a brief period when it was up, but mostly, not. My other domain is still down. I'm peeved, but if this site were still down, I'd be transferring to a new host right now, actually, probably I'd be done by now. That's the beauty of separating your domain registration from your web host. I can repoint my name servers any time and be up and running in a new home in about the time it would take me to ftp the files. Anyway, I've been steaming about since Saturday. No fun.
Sigh. Scandal is torture right now. I'm fixing crap and panicking, too. Oh joy. Not. At the gym this morning, I think I worked out the ending. Back to it.
Labels: kvetching, Scandal, writing freaking writing
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Friday, November 02, 2007
friday..... at last. But you were late damn you!
Today: Friday aka, the day before the day before Sunday.
Me: Exhausted.
Scandal: Still needs massive editing and lacks an ending.
Tomorrow: Busy. Soccer and writing. That's it.
Sunday: More of the same.
Labels: Scandal, writing freaking writing
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