• Mood: determined
• Music: John Prine - Your Flag Decal Won't Get You into Heaven Anymore

if we grow up we're all going to be famous.

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:

--30--

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?