Monthly Archives: March 2009
Not to be distracted by the blog tour or anything
| March 31, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood |
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But editing of Faerie Blood RC1 does continue! Two chapters knocked out tonight with reasonably little pain; in particular, I was really rather satisfied to observe that the sequence at the beginning of Chapter 18 where Kendis and Christopher jam was almost entirely untouched. A little bit more tweaking needed to be done in 19, both from my editor and from stuff I noticed myself. I’ve found myself yanking out a lot of ellipses and adding in contractions–a result, I think, of me having spent so much time these last many months editing the hell out of Lament.
I won’t significantly reduce Faerie Blood‘s word count, I think, but fortunately I don’t have too. We’re holding pretty steady around 97K, which is a nice fast read! If I do say so myself.
Edited tonight: Up through Chapter 19; four more chapters to go!
Drollerie Blog Tour master post is up!
| March 31, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Drollerie Press, Faerie Blood |
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If you liked the piece I did with Joely featuring her character Herakles, you should go check out the rest of the March 2009 blog tour posts, linked in now on drolleriepress.com.
And I would be remiss if I didn’t encourage you all to in particular note the piece hosted by the fine David Sklar, featuring my very own favorite (fictional) bouzouki-playing Newfoundlander, Christopher MacSimidh, bumping into David’s hero Tam from Shadow of the Antlered Bird. Because Seattle is just chock full of fey like that, and a young Warder-to-be cannot help but find the fey even if he would really rather not!
Go! Enjoy the goodness, folks, and tell ‘em I sent you!
Drollerie Blog Tour: Joely Sue Burkhart's Herakles from Beautiful Death
| March 31, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Drollerie Press |
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For this month’s Drollerie Blog Tour the theme is Character Interviews. This is the piece that resulted with my working with Joely Sue Burkhart on an interview of her character Herakles from the novel Beautiful Death. Enjoy!
Only when she is safely behind the protection of her closed and locked apartment door does Iris let herself explode. She can swear with impunity; her domicile, after all, was the best that the salary of one of New Olympia’s top news anchors could be. The walls are very well insulated, both to keep any urban din without, and her own temper within. For good measure she seizes a few expendable and satisfyingly fragile trinkets, and takes vicious pleasure into hurling them into her fireplace. Each one shatters, and one, a slender glass bottle filled with potpourri, sends sharp bursts of fragrance into her living room as its contents burn.
Faerie Blood RC1, and Blog Tour tomorrow!
| March 30, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Drollerie Press, Faerie Blood |
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Only one chapter tonight, but that’s okay, because some of my writing-related time this evening went into finalizing the next post I’ll be putting up for tomorrow’s Drollerie Blog Tour! Y’all be sure to come by and see what I’ll be posting on behalf of Joely Sue Burkhart, giving y’all a glimpse of Marshal Herakles from Beautiful Death.
Went through Chapter 17 tonight, as well as tweaking a couple of small things in previous chapters to clear up things that niggled at me through this edit pass. And it has occurred to me, after all the yammering I’ve done about writing a book being a lot like doing a software release, that this is pretty much RC1 for this book. This brings me lulz.
Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up the pace tomorrow evening. I’m feeling a little off-kilter and am really hoping I’m not coming down with whatever crud is going around at work. Now is really not the time. Besides, I’ve got Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea Season 4 DVDs to look forward to as my incentive for getting done with this edit pass! I can’t keel over now!
Edited tonight: Up through Chapter 17. Six more chapters to go!
Tonight's editing report
| March 29, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood |
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The Editing Marathon of a Whole Bunch of Editing continued through most of today. I didn’t get all the way to the end of the book–but I did make it about two-thirds of the way through.
Most of the changes my editor’s asked for continue to be small. Amusingly, though, a couple of the side characters have now been tweaked a bit. Jude’s ethnicity has changed a bit and Carson is now a Seattle native; I decided I needed a bit more representation of Seattle-born characters in the cast, in no small part because both of Seattle’s Warders in this book aren’t from Seattle at all.
Out of general technical interest I tried briefly to load my revision version of the manuscript into Open Office, just to see whether it would handle all the change-tracking stuff. The answer to this question, for those of you who might be interested, is “somewhat”. I did notice that the program had noted various changes that had been done, displaying the old text with strikethrough and the new text in blue. But it wasn’t nearly as cleanly handled as it is in Word.
So I guess when any future manuscripts of mine go into beta reading mode or (fingers crossed) being edited by actual editors, I’ll need to stick to Word for change tracking purposes. It’s just too damned useful that way.
Edited today and tonight: Up to the end of Chapter 16. Seven more chapters to go!
Editing!
| March 29, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood |
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I have now successfully navigated through revisions for the first six chapters of Faerie Blood. So far the experience has been very easy; it’s pretty much just like getting feedback from beta readers, especially given that most of my editor’s requested changes are quite minor. I’ve only found a couple that seem weird to me, so I’ve been able to spend some time thinking about those and coming up with possible compromise alternatives.
This is really rather fun!
And okay, yeah, fine, Word is a Microsoft product, Microsoft is evil blah blah blah blah–but I gotta say, Word’s Track Changes mode is super-useful. The ability to just drop in suggested changes and have another reviewer of the file accept or delete them is unbelievably helpful. So’s the ability to put in commentary. It does make me wonder whether non-Word word processors can interact with this feature at all. I’ll have to remember this for the next time I open up anything for beta reading.
Time for bed. More editing tomorrow.
Edited today and tonight: Up through Chapter 6! 17 more chapters to go.
Quick editing update
| March 25, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Faerie Blood, Valor of the Healer |
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Last night I did get in another paragraph in Lament which should be accounted for here. But now that I’ve gotten in the changes for Faerie Blood finally, Lament just dropped hard down the priority queue. We’ll see how this changes over the next couple of weeks, but at least through the weekend, I expect to be spending all my energy on FB.
Lament of the Dove:
Edited last night: +75
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,743
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 122,442
Faerie Blood:
Edited tonight: Reviewed changes for one chapter! 22 chapters to go.
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