Yes, I’m copy-editing on Christmas Eve. (Don’t have much choice.) But at least I’m getting some entertainment out of it: discovering, for example, that I described someone’s manner as “both sheepless and helpless.”
Sheepish. Not sheepless. Though it’s true he has no sheep, it’s not really relevant to this scene.
This totally would have been my icon for this book, had it been posted sooner.
Even if it is a meteor, rather than a comet.
Copy-edits for A Star Shall Fall arrived today. They’re due back shortly after New Year’s.
I got yer Glamorous Life of the Writer right here. >_<
I have a preliminary sketch for the cover of A Star Shall Fall and you don’t.
Hah!
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.
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 . . . .
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.
<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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
Totally the wrong kind of dance in my icon there, but it’s the best I’ve got.
Does anyone out there know, or know someone who knows, how to dance a minuet? Or any other kind of mid-eighteenth-century dance, for that matter. The Wikipedia entry on the minuet step is incomprehensible to the layperson, since it was written in 1724, and while the videos it links to show me the basic step, they don’t give me any sense of the shape of the whole dance, and how one interacts with one’s partner.
In other words, it’s time to replace my bracketed placeholder descriptions in the scene where Galen’s dancing a minuet, and I need references to go by. Movie scenes that depict it correctly would also work; unfortunately, the closest I’ve been able to get is Regency dancing, and that isn’t the same.
Hellllllllllp!
Those of you who follow my Onyx Court posts know how much I glory in finding random bits of weird history I can work into my tale.
In case you were wondering, it is possible for something to be too weird for me to include.
I can tell I was grappling hard with issues of plot and characterization and so on while writing this book because man, I have some awkward prose in here.
Mind you, my not-paying-attention prose of today is still generally better than my paying-attention prose of, say, five years ago, but that’s cold comfort. My miniscript has “awk” scribbled all over the margins. Relatively easy to fix; also boring as hell. It’s much easier to motivate myself to change the setting of a scene or re-order a set of conversational plot points than it is to vacuum the suck out of a paragraph.
And yeah, this is me procrastinating. My set goal is seven miniscript pages knocked off each day; I’ve done three so far. Don’ wanna go back to work. Wanna play with a new story. <whine>
Sometimes I really wish my job was something that would allow me to watch TV while I work.
Finit.
Man, it took me a long time to write that epilogue.
A Star Shall Fall both is and isn’t my longest novel to date. In Ashes Lie clocked in at about 143K in its final draft, but only 129,682 in the first round. I have no idea whether this, too, will be the Amazing Ever-Growing Book when it comes time to revise. That, my friends, is a concern for later.
This is my eleventh novel. I’m pretty pleased with it.
5008 words for Labor Day.
It isn’t labor if you love what you’re doing.
Almost done. Almost. It was five thousand because this was the climax; yesterday I wrote the first of the two scenes I’ve been wanting to write since I put together this proposal more than a year ago, and today I wrote the second. Ding, dong, the plot is dead, but the denoument lives on. There’s a bit of work to be done yet — at least one day’s worth, possibly two. We’ll see.
So very nearly done.
Word count: 130,090
LBR census: Blood and love, and some horrible, horrible rhetoric.
Authorial sadism: Memento people know I was never sure which Merriman I was crueler to, Francis or Philip. There’s no Philip Merriman in this story, but Galen’s taken his place. ‘Nuff said.
Time for some thrilling heroics.
Dear LiveJournals,
Have you ever been punched in the face? I mean, really punched in the face, not just your brother smacking you one when you were five?
What was it like?
I kind of need to know the subjective experience of realio trulio being decked (or otherwise struck — I suppose a car dashboard or the like would also do) so I can describe it properly, and while I will taste gin for this book, I will not court concussion for it.
Thanks,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Novelist
Word count: 110,810
LBR census: Ladies and gentlemen, THE BLOOD HAS ARRIVED.
Authorial sadism: I’ve been looking forward to writing this bit for four months now. I’m pretty sure that makes me a Bad Person.
***
There’s nothing I can say at this point that wouldn’t constitute a spoiler. Except that we’ve hit the fun part.
Fun for me, anyway. My characters might beg to differ.
