Sillybean

If only every day could be like today…

Woke up with half a story in my head, and snoozed a bit until I’d mentally finished it. Got up, wrote about 2K — not done, but enough to leave it alone for a while. Went to the library. Did a little web work. Went for a run. Read a little while cooling down, then [...]

WIP! Whee!

I’m in love with my new WIP. It’s actually an old one, but more on that later. I adore it. I’ve written nearly five thousand words in four days, I have a complete outline, and I’m having no trouble at all with the historical diction… yet.

I know it won’t last. Very soon I’ll be sick [...]

Gifts for Writers

When people who do not write try to buy gifts for writers, they often get it wrong.

Books

Specific books — things you think your writer might enjoy — a bad choice in most cases. We’re picky as hell. We have piles of books we intend to read that we haven’t gotten around to. We also have [...]

Random nattering

Got the MRI on my neck. No word yet from the doctor, naturally. The neck is not too bad at the moment, but the insomnia and the migraines have been slapping me around for the last few days. You know you’re having a lousy week when PMS is a welcome relief.

I have design ideas [...]

Oops, time for vacation

Our vacation has snuck up on me. Sarah and I are driving to Houston tomorrow night and flying to Boston on Saturday, meeting up with the boys there. They’ll be in training all next week, so we’ll be on our own during the day. We have food and touristy recommendations, but if you know where [...]

the greying of SF: not a myth

Over in a nice discussion of the generation gap in SF on Tor.com, a commenter crunches numbers on the ages of Hugo winners and comes up with a pretty clear trend. Really fascinating, assuming you care about this sort of thing in the first place.

ETA: A handy graph, all color-coded and shit, via Tobias [...]

Can’t sleep, book will eat me

I have given up any pretense that I’m just jotting down enough notes to remember the new book when I’m ready to come back to it and will soon return to revising the old one. This book is a freight train running at full speed, and it will flatten me if I do not keep [...]

Revisons, part eleventy-three

I am so very tired of this book, and so very excited about that other one I am not supposed to be writing.

The new first chapter is coming together in my head, though.

Saturday

My husband, who does not read for fun, snatched The Watchmen from me when it arrived in the mail today and has been ensconced on the couch with it for the last two and a half hours. Guess I’ll be reading that when he gets done….

My goal for this weekend is to revise the first [...]

Revisions, part bleh

As usual, the characters are great, but I have failed to bring the conflict. They’re having a cocktail party in my head, looking at me over the rims of their glasses like, “What? We’re not supposed to like each other?”

Annoying, they are.

Learning, and practicing, and confidence

So, Bear’s new column is up at Subterranean. It’s about learning, and learning how to learn. This made me stop and think:

But there’s a corollary. If all you ever attempt is things you can’t do, the result is discouragement. And also, coming back to things you can do, going over them again and again–like playing [...]

Revision update

The out-of-order problem is way worse in the second half, which I knew. I still love my subplot, and I think it’s less flawed than I thought it was. The main plot is more so, but… I think I can fix this.

Revision progress

I’ve been working on web stuff more often than not, so I’m going slowly through this, and I’m still on the first pass. Took the big pile o’ paper to the coffee shop writing group this morning, and I’m now up to page 250. I’m crossing out lots of stuff — scenelets that never went [...]

On the (nick)naming of characters

Halfway-plus through Sherwood Smith’s delightful Inda, I must pause and bitch: DAW, why O why did you not include the character list in the published book? Because, Christ on a crutch! In addition to the usual firstname-lastname thing, each school-age character gets two more names at the academy: an official name formed from the family [...]

Revisions. Oh joy, oh rapture.

I’ve figured out, more or less, what works and doesn’t work with the overall structure of the novel. The antagonist is barely there. The middle turning point is missing altogether, which I knew, but the first one’s pretty weak too, and the wrong secondary characters are in it. Stuff like that. I’ve also figured out [...]