Smart brain. Of course Danilaw likes 20th century rock music. First of all, it's a worldbuilding point (which I will not spoiler.) But if he speaks archaic English, however haltingly, it also lets him talk to the people on the generation ship, now doesn't it?

1629 words on Grail today--just over quota, but as soon as batwrangler gets here, I have to go to New Jersey. This is my last commitment for a good long time, though, and I'm looking forward to crawling into my hole and pulling it closed after me until I get a couple of these damned books written and revised.

The more accomplished I become as a writer, and the more confident I am in my skills, the worse my drafts get. In a lot of ways, this thing I am writing looks very much like a really elaborate outline. It's full of bracket notes that say things like [show don't tell] and [make these characters' voices sound different]. I'm choosing to believe that this is because my subconscious has accepted that there will have to be heavy revisions once I figure out what the book is about, and the only way I have ever been able to figure out what the book is about is to work through it.

Sometimes I outline. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I go back and outline stuff I've already written to see where it's going and get some distance on it. Sometimes I write out of order and sometimes I'm linear. Sometimes I scribble bits of scenes on scrap paper. There are no rules, only tactics that work or do not work.

Lately, my process seems to involve writing all sorts of sketchy things, bits and fragments and scribbles--and then later constructing a narrative out of them. This would terrify me, except I already did this on Chill and Bone & Jewel Creatures, and the final drafts of both books strike me as rather decent work.

Mean things: fears of the Other, barbarians, fretting by the phone.

16640 / 100000 words. 17% done!