throw another bear in the canoe

I'm in the bar in the Minneapolis Sheraton, drinking Laphroaig with a tonic and lime on the side, and working on B&I revisions while I await my 3:30 panel. It's weird being at a convention all by myself. I have so much time on my hands!

I'm not much of a panel-goer or party crawler, you see: I go to cons mostly to see people I don't get to see usually.

But the revisions are proceeding. I sent chapters 1-3 to Liz for her opinion (of course, she won't see them until Wednesday) and I'm to page ~130. Maybe a fifth of the way done. Working on what will be chapter 7.

I feel like all this new exposition is a bit more heavyhanded than I like to be--I'm an incluing-focused kind of girl--but if it helps more readers get through the book in one piece, so be it. At least the prose is a lot better than the beginning of the book. There are whole pages with no green on them at all.

The signing at Uncle Hugo's was nice yesterday, and I stopped by the Dreamhaven table and signed their stock today. Eventually, I may even learn how to spell my own name....

Back to geekville, I guess.

I still have about fifteen chizine subs to get through, too. And somebody at Ideomancer just sent me two or three weeks worth of slush. *raises eyebrow*

Sheesh. I think I'll do some of that when I finish this chapter.

The thing about books is that they have an infinite amount of suck in them. No matter how much suck you get out, there's always more suck available.

However, it is possible to produce books with a smaller infinities of suck.

Revising old books also keeps one humble. Because one looks at things that one thought was pretty hot stuff two or three years ago, and goes, Oh, my God. The suck.

And one hooks up the suckosector and attempts to, um, vacuum the suck (I almost said "suck the suck") out of the old book, and gets enormous amounts of suck out (although one can't ever get all the suck out: some things remain impervious to suckosection.)

And one is forced to realize that the books one thinks is pretty good today will look about as sucktastic as this one in, oh, two to four years.

Le sigh.

Memo to me, memo to me: Pick *one* spelling of Manannan and stick to it.

Matthew needs to stop quoting fairy tales. Or he needs to decide if he's the villain or the hero. So far, we have Bridge Troll, Big Bad Wolf, and Third Little Piggy. I'm tempted to change the third one to "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down," just for thematic consistency.

Except it doesn't fit the dialogue.

Alas. Art is foiled by mechanics yet again.