Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the Earth yet? Apparently, they're not actually smashing atoms until 10/21. So keep checking back!

---

In other news... The Greatest American Hero: The Movie ??? Oh, man. Will it still be a massive source of hippy propaganda and government-mocking? Pleeeaaasseeee?

Never has the subtitle of this blog (it's a great life if you don't weaken) felt more appropriate. Jeepers.

The progress notes will be informal today.

I was going to give myself a day off from running today, but I woke up at 6 am raring to go, so I got up and drank some water and answered my email and put my shoes on. I jogged the entire first mile (at a crawl, mind you) with the exception of the first two blocks, which I walked as a warmup. It was cold out--widget on my taskbar says 28 degrees F--and since I was out there by 7:20, the light was beautiful. Still, a whole mile! My cardio was great at the end of it, too--I took five minutes to stretch and recover, but I didn't really need them. I did make myself stretch for the whole five minutes though, temptations aside.

And then I ran/walked back on fire hydrant intervals (five of them) and took the last three blocks as a cool down. Time out: 16 minutes. Time back: 13 minutes. So when I say that joggy bit was a crawl, it was a crawl.

I was pretty ineffectual at the climbing gym last night--four routes, including a 5.7 I didn't finish. There's a traverse out from under a corner that is killing me. Also, I did a 5.5 with a small overhang that was the first route I ever sent, way back wen, and did not fall off the place where I always fall off. (Yeah, it's only a 5.5, but it's a 5.5 that involves dragging yourself out from under a corner with only one foothold, which is in a bad place.) Scraped up my right arm pretty good falling off a climb on the slab wall, but got back on the horse and finished it. Go team me.

The climbs helped break up the lingering anxiety. Some of it was back this morning, but I'm hoping the run will have taken it out of me. And I have PT today, and ashacat and I are going to see Jonathan Coulton tonight, so--those will also help.

On to the stuff that may actually interest some of you. I talked to my agent last night and got permission to suspend work on Chill for a while. Whether this means I won't make the June 1 deadline or not, I don't know yet. We'll see what happens in May. But I'm giving the book the rest of April to percolate, in the hopes that that will help me work through some of my issues surrounding it.

In further proof that it is, in fact, this damned novel that is killing me, I woke up this morning not only in a mood to write, but with a head full of stuff for the scene in "Ballistic" that I was swearing only yesterday I could in no wise write, for lo I was a burnout case and probably should be taken out behind the chemical sheds and put out of everyone's misery. I also figured out in the car last night (I should really list the Moby Smurfberry as my co-author, I do so much thinking in that buggy) one of the things that is turning Chill into such a fucking nightmare of a novel to write, why I keep glancing off its surface, and why I feel like I can't get into any of the characters at all.

Because the thematic arc that I find myself swearing up and down the book doesn't actually have is there, buried, and it's all about a bunch of people who grew up in a tremendously abusive, exploitive household, and the ways those experiences have affected them.

So here I am, writing all these damaged beauties, and no wonder my subconscious really doesn't want to let me inside their heads right now, considering what the last two years of my own headspace have entailed.

Stupid books as therapy. I dudn't want therapy. I just wanted a nice block of flats rollicking adventure novel.

Permission not to be working on the manuscript feels like somebody pulled a giant wodge of Kleenex out of my brain. Stupid book I am not ready to write yet. Why can't you be more like your brother?

And hey, I only have about 150 pages left to write. When it comes unstuck, I can do that standing on my head, right? :-P

Anyway, I have three sets of page proofs this moth, and two conventions, so It's not like there won't be enough work to keep me busy. And maybe the b&#k can use that time productively, to sort out its issues, so when we try to get back together there's a chance we can make this thing work.

233.9 miles to Lothlorien

And now I am going to go take off this sports bra before it cuts off circulation to my brain, and shower, and practice guitar before I go to PT.

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, I am rather a lot of money poorer, and will soon be two large items of furniture richer. Now I just need a decent desk, some bookshelves, a console table or coffee table or something like that, 2-4 more kitchen table chairs, and a comfier desk chair, and I will be living like a westernized human being.

I'm starting to collect real grown up furniture. It's very odd.

It am very excited to be obtaining a great big chair I can sit crosslegged in, one with enough room for girl, laptop, afghan, pillows, and clingy cat. *g* I coveted the ones downstairs at the WFC hotel so.

Now, to make this place halfway livable.

Poll #867622 *hic*
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 174

What sort of wine goes with housecleaning?

Ticky!

For those of you not up on early '80's cult television shows in America, The Greatest American Hero was program revolving around the adventures of Ralph Hinckley, a high school special ed teacher who was granted superpowers by benevolent aliens... and then promptly lost the instruction book. It starred William Katt, Robert Culp, and Connie Sellecca, and it was considerably better than it sounds from that description, mostly due to a steadfast refusal to take any of it particularly seriously.

In one particularly infamous episode, the aliens, serving in their time honored role of Deus Ex Machina, alert Ralph to the incipient End of the World by taking control of his car radio and dedicating the Barry McGuire tune "Eve of Destruction" to him. Repeatedly.

There's a high amusement value, as I watch these old shows on DVD, in noticing that apparently they couldn't get licensing for "Eve of Destruction," so they replaced it with another song. But in the dialogue, of course, Ralph is still talking about the radio playing the Barry McGuire tune at him.

That's pretty funny.

But not as funny as the eighties clothes.

---

I've gotten past 200 pages in the rewrite of By the Mountain Bound, and in the course of that it's shrunk from a little over 400 pages to (currently) 378, and I expect I'll get a bit more out of it in the process of going through that second half. It's kind of interesting, going back over this from a distance of five years. Because it's reminding me of how much I've learned in those years, specifically about the fine art of revising, which includes seeing what's on the page rather than what's in my head.

That's not an easy trick, by the way. But it is proving to me the truth of the old adage, that the rewriting is more important that the writing.

It's also reminding me that I learned how to handle plot and character long before I learned to write passable prose.

***

more review roundup:

http://fionas-books.livejournal.com/12266.html

http://mrissa.livejournal.com/343870.html

http://gauroth.livejournal.com/62418.html