contemplativeStill, progress are good.
And I'm firmly seated in Jenny right now: it's a relief to write her, especially Jenny happy, especially after Elaine. Jenny's indomitable, and the book is surprising me, and I'm pretty fucking sure it doesn't work as a stand-alone, sadly, for all the crash-course exposition I'm doing, but since Scardown is really the second half of Hammered, I guess I can't too much complain.
Nice if somewhat condescending reject from Weird Tales today, but I guess I can't expect everybody to automatically grasp that I used to work in a stable and I know a little bit about horses.
By the way, this is the real deep secret behind why writers tend to hold down so many jobs. If you do a lot of different things, you learn to fake a lot of skills. And that's what writing is all about: faking it convincingly.
I scared a reader today with the sex scene in Hammered. Humph. I really don't think it's all that bad. A touch kinky, maybe, but at least to my perception it's two people who really care about each other madly making up for lost time. I thought it was, well... sort of sweet. And mostly character development.
Funny, I just reread it. And on some levels it's very graphic: you're never at a loss for exactly who is doing what to whom. On the other hand, it's not exactly spelled out on a tab A into slot B level--and it's mostly "about" the emotional context it provides for the characters involved. If I ever sell the book, they'll probably make me cut it anyway. Thus proving Chelsea's point that you can have rape and murder and graphic torture, but good sex is impermissible in print.
Ah well. Now THAT is putting the cart in front of the horse.