Look! It’s, like, actual short story production!

1663 / 4000

I miss the Zokutou meter. <sniff>

If I weren’t getting sleepy, I might try to finish “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” (the story I blame mrissa for) tonight. But I’ve done more than 1300 already, and I suppose it’s just as well to spend a little extra time pondering just what Hel might say to Loki, especially while there’s a snake dripping venom on his face.

(Or more to the point, while there’s a snake dripping venom into the bowl above his face. Because Sigyn’s going to be sitting there during this whole conversation. And won’t that be interesting.)

But hey. It’s like I’m actually writing a short story or something. I’d forgotten what that feels like . . . .

Sirens site now up

As I mentioned before, I will be one of three Guests of Honor at next year’s Sirens Conference, along with Holly Black and Terri Windling. They’ve launched their new site, so go take a look; you can register, submit a proposal for programming (academic or otherwise), or just browse what’s already there. Everything I’ve heard about the conference has sounded utterly fabulous, so I hope to see some of you there.

State of the Swan

I don’t have to report for jury duty today — yay! So here’s an update on where I stand work-wise, in the wake of the India trip and A Star Shall Fall.

1) I do, of course, have to deal with copy-edits and page proofs for Star. Not sure yet when those will show up, though, so for the time being that work is in limbo.

2) Next after that one is the Victorian book. Due to the vagaries of my last few years, this, the fourth Onyx Court novel, will be the first one where I’ve had more than a month or two of lead time in which to do my research before I put words on the page. You have no idea how wonderful that feels. In order to give myself more time for the actual drafting, I plan to start that at the beginning of April, but that still leaves me five months for a leisurely, low-pressure campaign of prep reading. Look for various “help me o internets” posts as I figure out what I want to pick up first.

3) Writing full-time means I need to hold myself to a higher standard of productivity than I did while teaching or taking classes. Ergo, I’m also starting work on a pure spec project. For those not familiar with the term, writing “on spec,” i.e. “on speculation,” means you’re doing it on your own time, without a contract promising money when you’re done. This project, code-named TLT, is a just-for-me novel; if I don’t finish it, or if I do finish it and then decide it isn’t really for publication, then that’s okay. I’m doing it because I want to, because I think it’ll be fun. And “having fun” is an important part of this job, for the preservation of sanity. Anyway, the plan for this is to aim for 5K a week, with weekends off, and if I don’t make my goal then I won’t beat myself up over it.

4) I also have another sekrit projekt on the back burner, code-named FY. No wordcount goals for this one; I just want to play around with it and see what happens.

5) Short stories. I’m beginning to accept that short stories aren’t likely to happen while I’m drafting Onyx Court books, but the result is that my pipeline of stories has gotten fairly empty at every stage — very few upcoming publications, because very few sales, because very few submissions, because very few stories prepared, because very few stories awaiting revision. Between now and April, I’d like to make some progress in fixing that. The tentative goal is to finish both Edward’s untitled story and “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” before the end of the month; we’ll see if I can manage it or not.

Now I head up to the city for errands and the Borderlands signing tonight. India pictures later — hopefully tonight or tomorrow.

aaaaaaand we’re done.

A Star Shall Fall has been revised and sent to my editor. Now I wait for the CEM to show up. (Anybody want to start a betting pool as to whether I’ll be working on it over Christmas?)

Time to go eat the candy bar I’ve been saving as my reward.

WANT.

If you are a language geek . . . .

Go drool.

What I really want is, as the poster suggests, an online version integrated with the OED proper. The 4000-page doorstop sounds less user-friendly. But OMG do I want access to this book (and oh god, the things I could have done with it for Midnight, Ashes, and Star . . .).

an everything update

Back from India. I definitely need to post pictures and thoughts eventually, but I’m not sure when I’m going to do it, because of the rest of this post . . . .

World Fantasy is this weekend. If you’re going to be there, you can find me at the big autograph session, or at the “Bad Food, Bad Clothes, and Bad Breath” panel on Sunday at 11 (the topic being the grittier and less-pleasant side of premodern life).

I will also be at the second group signing at Borderlands Books on Monday night. Assuming, of course, that I don’t end up eaten alive by my Very First Jury Duty that day.

Aaaaaaalmost done with book revisions. I pretty much finished before I left for India, so I could let the book sit and then tweak anything else needing tweaking. Well, kittens, it’s time for some tweaking. But that needs to get done before World Fantasy, so I can send the book off to my editor.

And then there are some projects I intend to dive into as soon as that’s done with. More on those later.

In other news, a new interview with me has gone live at I Am Write, where (among other things) I talk about how the Onyx Court books were almost an all-folklore extravaganza instead of focusing on faeries.

Now I need to convince myself not to crawl back into bed (curse you, jet lag!), but rather to knock some of these things off my to-do list. I haven’t been reading LJ at all in my absence, so if you or anyone else posted anything I should see, let me know . . . .

prepping for the monsoon

Of course. I have to pick the one day it pours rain to fly to India.

(Understand: I live in a place where October is not a month in which it rains. Almost ever.)

Anyway. I’m off to India, weather permitting. Internet access will be unpredictable, so don’t expect to hear much from me for the next two weeks. But there will be pictures afterward.

Finit. (Again.)

Unless I end up cutting more than five hundred words from this in the copy-edits — which, I will grant, is possible — A Star Shall Fall has now squeaked out In Ashes Lie for the title of Longest Novel I’ve Ever Written.

By about five hundred words.

It’s been kind of amusing, watching the count inch upward as I add in bits here and there. I had a bet on with myself as to whether it would break that boundary, only I kept changing my wager. 🙂 Anyway, I may or may not be truly done with revisions; I’ll be looking back over it when I come home from India, before I send it off to my editor, to see if anything else has occurred to me in the interim. But for now, I declare it Done.

Time to go reward myself with a candy bar and some fun reading.

idea: good, timing: less optimal

Dear Whoever Puts the Inspiration Juice Into the Shower Water,

I appreciate it — I really do. But couldn’t you have waited to give me the opening paragraph to that Onyx Court story until after I was done revising this Onyx Court NOVEL?

Love,
A writer who was trying to stay focused

***

On the bright side, now that I know this and “An Enquiry into the Causes” aren’t the same story, I can write this one without doing any particular research at all. I’ll have to look some details up, sure, but I’ve read the necessary books already.

It’s kind of refreshing, after Deeds of Men.

today is Thank Your Computer’s Processor Day

<pets the desktop computer>

You’ve been such a good little thing tonight. Hardly even complained at all. I promise I’ll do my very best never again to make you run not one but two massive astronomical simulation programs at the same time.

But because of your hard work, I now know that I have to rewrite one of the scenes in this book.

Er, thanks. I think.

Love,
Your Friendly Neighborhood OCD Novelist

ETA: P.S. Sorry. I lied about the “never again” thing. That’s what you get for being so cooperative.

Mark your calendars!

I’ve been given the go-ahead to announce a piece of delightful news: next year, I will be one of three Guests of Honor at the second annual Sirens Conference in Vail, Colorado. The theme will be “Faeries,” and my fellow GoHs will be Holly Black and <drumroll> Terri Windling.

Hoh. Lee. <faints before she can say the rest>

Sadly, I wasn’t able to attend this year (and my brother ended up scheduling his wedding for that weekend anyway), but judging by various con reports, this sounds like everything I love rolled up into one giant ball of awesome, and then dropped into a gorgeous location. Roundtables and salon-style discussions, a pleasant but not overwhelming degree of academicism, and a topic that’s focused enough to produce really great discussions, while broad enough not to limit things too much. It’s like ICFA plus.

I’m told they’ll have the website updated for next year’s conference on November 1st, so I’ll post a reminder then. In the meantime, the gist is that it will be October 7th-10th, Vail Cascade Resort and Spa, and I hope to see as many of you there as possible. It should be fabulous.

oh hey

It turns out today is the first anniversary of Beneath Ceaseless Skies — which I discovered when I, proud of the fact that I’d almost caught up with back issues, clicked onto their site and found not two but FOUR new stories awaiting me. Yes, folks, it’s a double issue, in celebration of their anniversary, and I’m busy enough between now and when I leave for India that I’m going to come back to find myself almost as far behind as I was before. Oh woe!

Also, it seems they’ve added e-book formats to the usual web publication and audio podcasting. So if you have an e-reader, you can download their content as a PDF or Mobipocket PRC file. Which is nice and convenient.

Anyway, congrats to editor Scott Andrews on making it through a full year, with great fiction every two weeks like clockwork. That’s a hell of an achievement, in the world of web magazines.

GOD DAMN IT.

Or rather, God damn Edmond Halley. No, I really mean it this time. It turns out that one of my research books — one I’ve only been dipping into for pieces of information, rather than reading cover-to-cover — contains, squirreled away in one of its corners, the tidbit I searched handwritten Royal Society minutes in vain for.

Because I was looking in 1705. I didn’t think to ask for the minutes from freaking 1696.

Which turns out to be when Halley first said, “Oh hey, I think cometary orbits are ellipses, and the one we saw in 1682 is the one from 1607, with a period of about 75 years.”

Now, the minutes (as quoted in this book) don’t say whether he then did the basic arithmetic necessary to guess that the 1682 comet would be coming back in the mid-eighteenth century. But you have to figure he did. Which means this bastard came up with that theory nine years earlier than I thought.

Which leaves me with a choice: either I can take out all the references to the fae learning about this problem in 1705, rewrite Irrith’s personal history and the political history of the Onyx Court in a fashion that compensates for the breakup of a certain constellation of events that occurred in the opening years of the eighteenth century, and give up on the cameo appearance by Isaac Newton that I just wrote tonight . . .

. . . or I can remember that, hey, I’ve already said they learned about this from a seer, and then handwave a reason why she didn’t get that vision until Halley got around to publishing his ideas.

Guess which one I’m going to choose.

also

I would like to take this moment to damn Edmond Halley for publishing his Astronomiæ cometicæ synopsis three months before he presented on that topic at the Royal Society. Because of him, I’m having to rewrite this prologue (originally drafted as part of my submission packet for the book, i.e. before I really did my research), and it’s just annoying. Why couldn’t he have had a nice rousing argument at a Society meeting first?

census

There are at least 110 named characters in A Star Shall Fall, counting dead people who get mentioned in passing.

Oh, wait — 111. I forgot about Reginn. And Fafnir, so that’s 112.

Now begins the task of determining which ones deserve to be in the Dramatis Personae. Not all of them, certainly. But where to draw the line? That is, as always, the question.

a few bits of linky

The Mermaid’s Madness is out! This is the sequel to The Stepsister Scheme, which was a fun, Charlie’s Angels-ish take on the world of fairy tales, with Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White teaming up to save the kingdom. I’ve been looking forward to seeing the story go on, since I’m a big sucker for that kind of thing. But I’m not allowed to buy the book until I finish my own revisions (which I hope to do before I leave for India next week), so you all should go buy it now to make up for my own delay.

***

I posted a while back about Save the Dragons, a crowdfunded novel whose proceeds are going toward paying the quarantine costs for the author’s pets, a group of rescue cats and dogs he does not want to abandon when his family emigrates to Australia. That’s made good progress so far, but he needs to pull together the remaining money by Christmas, so if you can spare him a few bucks, please do.

***

Looks like the Dell Award has a spiffy new webpage! This was the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing back when I won it; the name has changed, but the mission has not. If you’re an undergraduate, or a recent graduate (i.e. you left college last spring), you’re eligible to submit short stories. If you’re neither of these, but you know some college-age SF/F short story writers, pass the word along. It’s a great award, and I would recommend it even if I hadn’t won.

***

A review of the second issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. In discussing “The Waking of Angantyr,” the reviewer says “A piece of heroic fantasy starring a woman is a nice surprise.” Even after twenty-some-odd Sword and Sorceress anthologies, heroines are still enough of a rarity in that subgenre that they’re worthy of comment. I bring this up because it would warm the cockles of my heart to see HFQ get a slew of good stories with female protagonists, so that we can take another little step towards a world where characters like Hervor aren’t unexpected.

bounced e-mail — do you know the recipient?

Back in August, I got an e-mail from an individual with the initials GH (not sure if he wants his name shared publicly) who offered assistance in translating some bits of dialogue from this book into German. I just tried to get back in touch with him, and the e-mail bounced, saying the recipient domain rejected it. If you are the one who passed my request along to GH, could you drop me an e-mail or LJ message and help me contact him?