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Posts Tagged ‘the tropic of serpents’

Books read, March 2013

I almost posted this yesterday, because really, as such posts go, this one is a joke. I did many things in March, but reading books? Not really one of them.

Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett. Returning to my leisurely saunter through [personal profile] swan_tower Finally Reads Discworld. I have now been properly introduced to Sam Vimes, previously encountered as a minor character in Monstrous Regiment (before I started reading things in order). I like him, though not as passionately as some people seem to — possibly I will grow more attached in time? I liked Sybil quite a lot, and the reflections on how her brand of confidence is both personal and class-based. I was mostly meh about the bad guy’s scheme, but on the whole, much fun.

the memoir that is still untitled Re-reading the second book of the series preparatory to revising it (which is what I’m in the middle of doing now). It still needs a title. I will have to fix this soon.

Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, David Gaider. Read for research, as [profile] kniedzw and I have begun running a Dragon Age game. Not really worth your time, unless you are a rabid completist for that franchise. It offered little in the way of worldbuilding information I didn’t already know, and, well. This is David Gaider’s first novel, and boy howdy does it show. Hopefully he improves with the later ones, since I need to read those, too.

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news, posts, ets ceteras, I HAVE A TITLE

I’m drowning in revisions right now (due Monday; I’m almost done; I just need my brain to keep working a few days more), but I’m surfacing long enough to share a few things.

First: YOU GUYS YOU GUYS YOU GUYS I FINALLY HAVE A TITLE. The sequel to A Natural History of Dragons will be called The Tropic of Serpents.

(Now I just need to go put that phrase in the book somewhere.)

Next, story sale! To the charity anthology Neverland’s Library, which will be funded through Kickstarter, and 50% of whose profits will go to First Book. The story in question is “Centuries of Kings,” based on several Chinese and Japanese folktales.

Finally, I have a couple of posts up in different places, that I hadn’t yet linked here. One is over at Darkeva’s blog, talking about how I developed the habit of choosing music for a story while working on the original draft of Lies and Prophecy. The other is my biweekly post at BVC, talking about how folklore adds another later to the world around you.

Time for me to go work some more on revising The Tropic of Serpents. (I am going to be using the title incessantly for a little while, now that I have it to use.)

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a long shot

Does your university library have a copy of Victorian Colonial Women’s Travelogues: Early British Colonial Rule in East Africa, by Benjamin M.O. Odhoji?

Are you willing to take a brief look at it for me and report back?

If so, ping me. Here or at marie {dot} brennan {at} gmail {dot} com. Stanford’s library has for once failed me.

EDIT: I’ve now heard from two people that the book isn’t even listed in Worldcat, so, um, nevermind. <sigh>

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Something more like a book

After yet more whinging and moaning and telling myself I earned a break with yesterday’s work, I made myself put my butt in the chair and start typing . . . and two thousand words later, I have hit the mighty 80K mark, which is the point at which this starts to feel like a Real Book to me.

Of course, this isn’t the Onyx Court: I’m aiming for 90K total, rather than the nearly 160K that With Fate Conspire ended up clocking. So that particular boundary lies quite close to the Finished Book line right now. I still have various things that need fixing — in fact, I’ve been revising as I go for a while, settling the characters who kept changing their names, putting guns on mantelpieces after I realized I needed to fire them somewhere in the 70K stretch, etc — but I’m going to arrive at the end of this month with a passably decent draft, I think.

And that, my friends, is victory.

Edited to add — bonus (spoiler-redacted) quote, to celebrate my achievement, and the fact that two finished copies of A Natural History of Dragons showed up today:

This is how I marched out of [place] toward [place] with what, at first glance, might understandably be mistaken for a small invading army.

Fortunately, the confusion was resolved before anyone fired upon us.

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this is why the first rule is, put your butt in the chair and start typing

For a night when I really didn’t want to start working and whinged and moaned about it and tried to convince myself I could get away with a night off (I really, really can’t), those 3500 words sure fell out of my head awfully easy.

Especially given that my aim was only to write 2000 words tonight.

I could take the night off tomorrow, if I wanted. But I need to remember this part is fun, and also that getting the book done sooner rather than later is a good thing.

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