they must need bears

I just emailed the page proof corrections for Hell & Earth back to Jessica-my-editor. There were 14 of them in total. The Stratford Man is done.

I started work on this duology at Christmas of 2002, is anybody was wondering.

Wow, that feels... weird. Good. But weird.

I think, except for Shadow Unit stuff,  I get the weekend off.

ETA: Hey! This means I can spend all day tomorrow watching Soap on DVD and eating junk food! Wooo!

The page proofs are dead. Long live the page proofs.

After two days of climbing and two days of weightlifting this week, and a massage therapy appointment today, I am not exactly surprised to realize just how badly I hurt. Although my therapist did get my right shoulder to let go of some serious tension it was holding for reasons unknown.

Supposedly, it's snowing outside, but I can't see it from where I'm sitting.

I am now going to go take a hot shower, drink some water, take a couple of naproxen, and do some writing. And tomorrow, I have nothing to do except write, and start on the All the Windwracked Stars CEM.

The deathmarch is on.

Sunday, Episode #2 of Shadow Unit goes live, and we have some supacool extras as well. I know you can't wait!

Also, I have some pending good news on a couple of fronts, but it's all very Secrit right now, so I will have to tell you later.

2056.

I'm calling it a draft, even if the final scene is more of a sketch.

Fix it later.

I am so tired of this story I could spit.

Reconciliation

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its deeds of carnage must in time be utterly lost,
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soiled world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin--I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

---

I have written ~4,907 words since 1 pm. "Overkill" is finished, in a very ragged draft.

This means I have to do absolutely nothing tomorrow... er, today... except float about the house being drained, do the post-mortem for CM 3x11, and--if I am not snowed the hell in, which seems unlikely--go to archery.

Oh, and I can watch some of the preciousssss.

Friday, I have to revise "King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree."

Hey, take your vacation where you can get it.

And done. Which means the rest of the day is a time for heavy drinking, overeating, and casual sex with farm animals watching the Muppets and accepting the fact that my freaking brain is scraped.

Oh, gawd. Wow. I can't believe this monster is finally done.

I mean, yeah, there's still the possibility Jessica will send it back to me and say "do it over, you suck." And there is CEMs and the galleys to get through.

But wow.

It hasn't really sunk in yet that this damned thing is out of the house. I think I kind of thought it would never see print.

Hey, truepenny? cheshyre?

Thanks, guys.

And thanks to the rest of you, too, both those who pitched in to help make it a real book, and those who have listened to me maunder about it since early 2003.

I declare myself on vacation until January, except I have to write "Wind Up Boogeyman" and finish "King Pole, Gallows Pole, Bottle Tree." (ONE DAMN SCENE.)

The two novellas and the revision on By The Mountain Bound are just gonna wait until after I write Chill, at this point. (Now that I know what I need to do to BTMB, I am calm about the revision. It won't be a big deal, I think. casacorona, if you have any other notes than the ones you gave me already, kick them on over at your leisure?)

Now I'm gonna get me a sammich. And a nap.

pecunium talks about the process of improving a photograph through cropping, color-balancing, etc, here.

This is how the editorial process works in writing, too. You have your grotty first draft, with through-line problems and false trails and misleading bits and muddy stuff and muddles and messes. And then you go over it gently and carefully, to make it precise and bright and to let it show everything it must, without showing anything it shouldn't.

Although sometimes, honestly, you just can't get the red flowers off the bottom unless you are willing to cheat.

I'm still waiting for the edit letter for Hell & Earth (this is so not getting done before WFC), but I've just gotten a preliminary note on By the Mountain Bound from casacorona, who has a perfectly reasonable problem with the POV of the book. (It's a problem that I'm not sure I know why is happening, because I was at pains to prevent it, but there you go: sometimes what we are trying to do just doesn't work.)

So I have two potential solutions, both of which entail yet another complete rewrite of the book. One is to recast it in third person, which I am loathe to do, because of intimacy of POV--a story about three people not commicating very well, it seems to me, goes down better if they are the ones telling the story; it helps makes the miscommunications intimate and organic, rather than horrible cheap tacky romance-novel plot devices--unreliable narrator issues. (Okay, Blood & Iron has an unreliable third-person narrator, but since part of the unreliability is the third-person (it's a lie!)) Which is to say, and "I" telling you a story is, in my head, allowed to be purblind, mislead, and often just plain wrong. A "he" telling you a story--if that happens? It's the author cheating, because she sucks, and probably should have her typewriter taken away and smashed with a hammer to learn her better.

Um, yeah, I'm unreasonable about that one.

On the other hand, I'm aware that it's a gut-recoil issue and a squid, and I could probably be convinced if it's really what's best for the book. After all, I'm going to hate it by the time it's done anyway; it doesn't matter if I hate it for unreasonable reflexive issues or because I've read the motherfucking thing seventy-three times and rewritten it six. (I honestly can't even open Blood & Iron, at this point. It gives me hives to think about it.)

But before I do that, I'm going to try to sharpen up the distinctness of the voices in the first few chapters and see if that will work for Beth. I'm not actually sure what the problem is, because while the characters have similar cultural and social backgrounds (always a problem) they also each have a series of well-defined linguistic quirks and habits, and a sensory palette. But you know, I can front-load those things a bit more and see what happens. It may just need a tiny push to shift the equilibrium.

I want what's best for the novel, after all. The novel is what's important, not my own unreasonable prejudices. But I would also like a book that doesn't make me reflexively want to chop my fingers off for having written.

But first, I need to start going through Refining Fire. Because, ladies and gentlemen, we have a draft. At 56,000 words (MS word count, not manuscript count) or so.

It's a short novel, but it's a novel.

*\o/*

Well, assuming casacorona doesn't send it back to me and tell me to really wash behind my ears this time, I think that's the edits on All the Windwracked Stars put to bed.

That was not actually the easiest edit-to-editorial-direction ever. The easiest edit ever was Scardown, which I did in about two hours. (The worst was Blood & Iron, which took months.

Guess there's something to be said for doing fifteen drafts, rewriting the book from scratch, and then doing a couple more passes before you hand it in....

Now, just Ink & Steel and Hell & Earth to go this autumn.

In other news, it's officially autumn. I'm wearing wool socks and a sweater and craving apple cider, which I cannot have until I have a vehicle again, and the winter jasmine is blooming.

First off. Second (or thirty-second) draft of AtWS finished. That hurt much less than it might have.

Second:

mrissa on Writing Out Of Sequence.

avocadovpx on Kay Kenyon on Storyboarding.

pecunium on Knives.

netcurmudgeon on Archival Storage.

Go forth and read.

I'm going to have, in the immortal words of M. Keaton, a sammich. And a nap. 

I have a draft.

The last chapter is pretty much ass, I think, but I could be wrong. And it needs some fiddly work throughout. But other than that, I think it's pretty tight.

Also, I have author copies of W&W. And the new Locus.

I think I'm going to title these chapters, and then go fall down.

Well, I still need a series title and a character name and possibly a double handful of epigraphs, but I just sent the "If I get hit by a bus" version of Dust off to my agent and editor.

I guess the ending was more finished than I thought.

Fork. Me. Stick.

I'll talk to y'all sometime when I can brain.

words since 12:00 AM Monday: 8363
sleep since 6:30 AM Sunday: 9 hours
hours in deathmarch TOTAL: 32,5
showers: 2
pages written: 45
pots coffee: 2
large mugs salabat: 2
pots tisane: 2 (licorice spice, strawberry kiwi)
pots tea: 1 (black dragonfruit)
dancing: rock lobster and the electric slide
handfuls of nutritional supplements: 2 (flax oil, borage oil, assorted vitamins)
food: pretzel rod, sticky rice with soy sauce, cheese and rosemary crackers, mushroom chicken steamed bun, olives marinated in bay, greek yogurt, cherries, two persimmons with lemon juice, 3 cubes of crystallized ginger; a big bowl of fortified whole-grain angelhair pasta with cheese, a glass of grapefruit/cranberry juice, more pasta (this time lemon pasta with peas and cheese), muesli with 2% milk, tom yum with crab dumplings and straw mushrooms and random green things, baked enoki, toddy palm seeds, cranberry juice, 1/6th of a bar of Maya Gold chocolate
alcohol: 4 shots of bourbon
drugs: 4 aspirin, 2 naproxene sodium

done.

as in, finished.

95.000 words.

It's a draft.

It might be stupid, but it's finished.

stillsostrange read the revised bits and had declared them good.

The book has been emailed to the editor.

Now I get to curl up, eat miso, and watch I Spy until my eyes fall out.

Book sixteen. La.

25,428.

Draft.

Dammit.

I wound up killing somebody I didn't expect to. I hate that.

Well, the wolfygothboybook is done, and has been sent off to hopefully beguile an editor. Further notes as developments warrant. Now the question is, do I goof off for the rest of the day, or start the soup and then stare at "Chatoyant" for a while?

Progress notes for 7 November 2006:

By the Mountain Bound

New Words:  748
Total Words: 81,644
Pages: 372
Deadline: --
Reason for stopping: Done!

Stimulants:  jasmine tea
Exercise: walked to the polls and back 
Songs mutilated: actually, guitar practice is my very next thing to do.
Mammalian assistance: Mebd was clingy, but now has resumed her regularly scheduled sleeping on my bed and ignoring me
Mail: nomail, but I got a rejection from Strange Horizons last week

Today's words Word don't know: leaflorn, kinked, whatso'er, seithr, downturned, mundanities, recrossed, unwarded, withy, weregild, bastardy, directionless, ungood, wot, legless, Wyrm, bitted, blinkered, hoofbeats, unchanneled, stormfront, swordless, unwelcoming, retuned, unhewed, unlooked, enslavers

Mean Things: End of the wurld!
Jury-rigging: Actually put in some hints as to the actual, you know, plot of the book.

There's always one more quirk in the character: That bitch is crazy. Just saying.
Books read: I finished crowleycrow's book, which is wonderfully written, but I think I have some deep philosophical issues with it. In any case, I found it disturbing, and I need to think about it for a while.
The glamour!: I slept in until almost 8 am this morning. That was nice.

Well, the froggies are Anne's problem now.

Hey, look at that.

Three days before deadline.

*falls over now*

...hmm. I know I'm supposed to be on the wagon until Worldcon, but boy do I feel like I've earned a drink....

Tomorrow, I have to do laundry and clean this pit of a apartment.

***

The nice thing about experience is that, even though I know this book is kind of broken, I'm not worried about it. Because it's broken in almost exactly the same way that One-Eyed Jack was broken, and I fixed that one, after all. (Halfway through, it turned out to be not the book I had meant for it to be. When this happens, you can fight the book and lose, or you can shrug and let it do what it wants.)

---

Eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. 71% humidity.

Still better than Las Vegas.

I've got the AC on and I'm writing the end of the book to Roxette. Because that's just what says "tree-climbing in a hurricane."

And yes, one does say "Undertoad!" with exactly the same diction that one would say "Underdog!" How clever of you to notice.

Progress notes for 11 July 2006:

Undertow

New Words:  2,567
Total Words: 87,611 / 100,000
Pages: 404
Deadline: August 1
Words per day to meet deadline: 0
Scenes left / scenes myrtilized (notecards, if I were using notecards this book): 0
Reason for stopping:

Ladies and gentlemen, that's a draft.

Admittedly, the last 100 pages need to be rewritten, revised, and generally banged on with a hammer before being given three coats of bondo, a good sanding, and two coats of paint, and there are places where I really probably should write the scene where they save the world rather than dispensing with it in a one-paragraph flashback... but I have ten thousand words of wiggle room. It's broken. But it can be fixed. And I even think I know how.

And my ceremonial week off guilt-free from writing any fiction starts now.

Life is good.

404 / 400 (101.0%)

That is my fifteenth completed novel. That feels kind of good.

Stimulants:  carrot juice, olive bread with olive cream cheese, raspberries, grocery store sushi. That wasabi Wild Oats uses? That stuff is nas-tay. Fortunately I had some ungross wasabi in my fridge.
Exercise: none, unless carrying three reams of paper and some groceries upstairs in the disgusting heat counts. Well, and I stretched a little and did some squats, for I am sore from the wobble board yestereve.
Mail: There is a mystery package coming from Random House. I wonder What It Can Be? Also, Roc sent me a couple of copies of their giveaway paranormal romance sampler, which features, among five other titles--Blood & Iron. (Cover Copy:

Kickass Femmes.
Alpha Males.
Undead Love, And
A Twist of Faerie Magic...

)Oh dear. I hope no-one who buys it based on this advertising is too terribly shocked when the only vaguely alpha males are the dying werewolf prince and his would-be successor. And I think the characters who can be described as femme are some secondary characters, a villain, and a lesbian. 

Ah well, two out of four ain't bad....

Also, gwyneira liked Blood & Iron. 

AND I hear a rumor that SOMEBODY on my reading list got a starred, boxed, illustrated, flashing red ASCII review from Booklist.

Today's words Word don't know: luff
Mean Things: Blew up many things.
Tyop du jour: clamped to nearby tree limps
Darling du jour: Blood, fatigue, and rainwater did not blur his sight.
Phrases I spent fifteen minutes trying to work out a way to avoid: "How thin it had grown."
Jerry-rigging: This new thing where I have to write a sentence, stop, and stare at it, and then revise it--it slows me down a lot, But it does turn sentences like "There was a lot implied in Jean's silence," to "Jean's silence implied much." So I'll live with it.
There's always one more quirk in the character: Jean caved to expedience. Poor Jean.

Other writing-related work: none
Books in progress: Martin Cruz Smith, Stallion Gate; Jane Austen, Pride & Prejudice;

Man, have you seen these Army recruitment ads that are all about setting parents up as the adversary for a bright young man who wants to sign up?

Hallelujah.

Well, that was like trying to eat my way out of a porridge dungeon with chopsticks. I sure hope this book is more interesting the first time you all read it than it was the 30th time I did.

Blood and Iron, for the record, is my most-rewritten book. The original concept dates from the eighties; the first draft of portions from oh, 1990 or so, the first complete draft from winter 2002. That first complete draft was irretrievably broken. I rewrote it extensively twice (including unpersoning characters and major plot changes) and gave it a pretty thorough line-edit twice before arcaedia saw it. Segue to 2003, when she told me it was still broken. At which point I took it apart, restructured it heavily, cut 40,000 words or so, added 60,000 words or so and two POV characters (and removed one), and rewrote it again, followed by another clean-up pass. At which point we agreed that maybe it wasn't broken any more.

Then we sold it. And I rewrote it again, for Liz.

Another fairly heavy rewrite. Plus spot revisions. And then a clean-up pass. And a CEM. And the page proofs.

I can't even remember what happens in which version of the damned thing any more. But at least most of the story is onscreen now.

So anyway, reading this damned thing is like archeology at this point. It has strata.

You guys are going to have to let me know if it's any good, because I have not the foggiest.

Still.

It's done.