throw another bear in the canoe

Yesterday, I wrote about 3,000 words of Range of Ghosts. Today, I have no clue how much I'm going to write, but it would be nice if it too were a good big chunk. (3000 words a day is about the most I can do sustainably, and I cannot always even manage that.)

Anyway, yesterday Samarkar whipped out higher mathematics at a crime scene, and my love for her crystallized. I have a serious kink for science!wizards. As you may have noticed.

Today, if I am virtuous, I may make it to the tiger. TIGER! 

This book is being very good about both keeping the cool coming, and providing me with enough ideas for the next day's writing without having to stare into space and make snuffling noises for long periods of the day. It's kind of a romp, really.

Meanwhile, I have Inside Information that the copy-edited manuscript for Grail is coming back to me soon, as apparently Spike, my illustrious copyeditor baron_elric's polymorphously polydactyl cat, is done with it.



Spike is something of a character, as you can see here:



And now, once I wash my hair, back to the word mines.

One of my projects for the forseeable future is figuring out what the Assassisn'ts' sky looks like*. And also what the Assassisn'ts are actually called when their creator isn't being flip about them, and overgeneralizing. Although I did name a primary antagonist today, so that's some positivew action.

And I wrote 2,000 words, and got to the tiger. Tomorrow, I get to write the tiger, and possibly advance the plot.

I like the tiger a lot.

* The sky actually is a different color in their world. Well, kinda.

Hurt something in the palm of my hand today on the first route I tried; taped hell out of it and kept climbing, but eventually had to quit. I did this same thing to myself on the other hand about three years ago; nothing to do but wait it out and try to climb a little down in the grades. Cod dammit; just when I was staring to feel like I was really moving off my plateau.

Oh well. Patience is a virtue. And it's not about the goal; it's about the journey.

Like novels.

Autumn is coming to New England. Yes, yes, technically we have a month of summer left, and the real dog days haven't settled in to cook us yet (we had one nasty hot spell, but there's usually another one long about any minute now), but the drought-stressed maples are starting to turn vermilion around the edges, and tonight, driving back from the gym, I got the year's first look at that wonderful New England autumn evening light--the lazy low-angle light that makes the whole world glow as if caught in amber.

Damn, I love it here.

Meanwhile, in addition to having a novel due and a CEM enroute, I just got the edit letter for A Reckoning of Men. casacorona has no love for the Reckoning part of the title, so from now until we come up with a better title, it will be known hereby as An Amphibrach of Men.

I guess I better eat me a salad (oh, The Discipline!) and get back to work.

These darn books don't write themselves, more IS the pity.

Via Making Light, a very cool Viking-era reconstruction page. I'm pretty sure that a number of readers of By the Mountain Bound and A Companion To Wolves have wondered what, exactly, a lot of this stuff looks like...

Here's a page that has a detailed description of longhouse architecture and furnishings, including the bed-closets I referred to as "niches" in By the Mountain Bound. The longhouses commonly seen in both books, I should point out, are much bigger than these--more on the Beowulf model of a fortification for a war-band than a farmer's household (a heall rather than a croft, in other words), although there's a fairly detailed description of a small longhouse with a sleeping loft and livestock accomodations in By the Mountain Bound.

One of the fun things about the Iskryne books (of which A Companion to Wolves is the first) is that they take place at a point in history where the longhouses and their associated stockades are giving way to more modern stone keeps, which--being stone in the era before the flying buttress and the vault--demand smaller rooms with many support walls, or great halls that are a forest of columns. It's probably pretty obvious by now that I have a Thing for fantasy in which history and technology are not static for thousands of years (usually between the Past Catastrophe and the Current Coming Of The Chosen One (with optional Dark Lord metastasis)) but rather change and evolve.

Also, there's a lot of talk about bathhouses.

And here's a thing I did not know: "In the old language, blár probably meant a dark blue-black, and the sagas distinguished the color blár from the color svartr. Blár is the color of a raven, whereas svartr is the color of a black horse."

I shall be making use of that factoid. Never you fear.