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Bone Walker

Back to Bone Walker

Tonight’s writing activity: just over 200 words into Chapter 11 of Bone Walker, just to remind myself where I left off with that and to try to get it moving along again too.

So far so good. This is ten days in a row I’ve managed to do something writing-related, and I think part of what’s helping is not having any specific thing to shoot for besides “do something writing-related daily”. It’s the least stress-free goal I’ve been able to think of, and it’s actually helping! I think it also helps to be loose like this since I do have so many different projects vying for my attention; this way, I can latch on whichever one demands my attention the loudest on any given night. (Still though the lion’s share of this attention has got to go to Lament, and I won’t go more than a day or two without poking at it.)

Wish me luck on keeping it up, folks.

January 10, 2011 by
Bone Walker, Child of Ocean Child of Stars, Mirror's Gate, Queen of Souls, Shards of Recollection, Short Pieces, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter

2011 says HIYA! And also, bring it

So by and large, 2010 went pretty well for me on a personal level–but not quite so much on a writing level. I’d like to change that this year, and that means getting Seriously Back on the Stick. Here are various goals I’m going to aim for this year. Sooner is better, but I’m not going to nail time frames down to these because really, the overall goal boils down to this: Get Back My Writing Discipline. Anything above and beyond that will be cake.

In general order of priority, these are the main goals:

  1. First and foremost: finish the edit pass on Lament of the Dove and get the revised manuscript back to Carina Press. Current status: Chapter 19 of the word count reduction pass.
  2. userinfoupstart_crow has given me an anthology invite, so I need to plan out what I’ll be writing for that. This is higher priority right now than either Bone Walker or Queen of Souls, since it’s a solid invite and will mean Actual Albeit Small Cashy Money, assuming the piece is accepted. More on this as events warrant; right now I don’t even have a story idea, and the antho in question is quite a bit far out yet.
  3. Follow up with Drollerie as to whether Bone Walker will actually be feasible for Drollerie to pursue this year, and if so, what they need from me to make it happen. Either way, I should go ahead and finish it. Current status: still in chapter 11, and I’m about to the point where I need to plan out what’s going to happen for the rest of the book.
  4. Review where I left off with editing Queen of Souls and get that into queryable shape. Current status: still pretty much on Chapter 2 of the second draft.

Everything above and beyond these things is a stretch goal, right now. This includes all of the current notable works in progress, which are:

  1. Shadow of the Rook. Current status: Made it into Chapter 4 before serious edits to Lament made it clear the beginning of Shadow will have to be heavily reworked as well. Therefore, Shadow will remain on hold until Lament‘s edits are done.
  2. Mirror’s Gate. Current status: Chapter 2.
  3. Child of Ocean, Child of Stars. Current status: Interlude between Chapters 3 and 4.
  4. Shards of Recollection. Current status: Chapter 1.
  5. Still-untitled Faerie Blood-universe piece starring Elizabeth the psychic, and Ross the brother of a murdered Warder. It’s still not clear to me whether this piece is going to be a novella or a novel in its own right. Review of it must occur.

And oh yes: I DO still intend to do the last couple of How to Read Ebooks posts, as well as any further ones that occur to me. If anyone has specific requests about ebook-related things you’d like to see me post, please let me know!

Tonight, I can safely say that editing of Lament has happened. I doublechecked Chapter 18 and realized there was another minor scene with Celoren that I could completely nuke–partly because it didn’t really advance the plot much, and partly because removing it also addressed one of the various issues from Carina’s editor. And I’ve headed into Chapter 19, where I’ve re-discovered that I did leave this chapter in a bit of a mess after cleaning up the tail end of 17. Now I get to clean that mess up.

It’s also become clear that I will indeed be swinging back around for a sixth draft once the word count reduction draft is done. It’ll have to be the sixth draft where I go back in and put in significant new content.

And since I’ve made it a couple of pages into Chapter 19, about 20 minutes shy of midnight, I’ll call that today’s writing-related activity. More tomorrow. DAMMIT.

Edited tonight: Quite a bit, actually
Chapter 18 revised total: 3,750
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,815
Lament of the Dove revised total (fifth draft): 105,783

January 1, 2011 by
Bone Walker, Site Updates

Housekeeping, and a Bone Walker blurb

I got tired of looking at the same theme over and over again, and after a lot of failed attempts to find a new one I liked, I finally settled today on “2010 Weaver”, a child theme of the Twenty Ten default theme that came with WordPress 3.0. The big reason I chose this theme was to take advantage of the ability of WP 3 to do menus–and as you can see if you look at the site (or if you click through off of the LJ or DW versions of this post), I’ve got a fully functioning menu now.

Spent much of this afternoon setting that up and tweaking a bunch of the settings to get it the way I wanted it. Along with twiddling the theme, I also took the time to sweep through all the pages on the site and update them as best I could, so at this point everything should be current. Most notably, I’ve spun off separate sub-pages for both Faerie Blood and Defiance, on the assumption that if I keep selling material, more of my books will want their own sub-pages. I fleshed out each of these new pages with a bit of an excerpt as well.

And, I updated the In Progress page with a current working version of the blurb for Bone Walker! Here it is:

Two months after the rising of her faerie blood and magic, Kendis Thompson thinks she’s starting to get the hang of her altered life. Along with her boyfriend Christopher MacSimidh, she’s learning magic from Millicent, the senior Warder of Seattle. Christopher’s taking to his long-denied Warder power, and all in all, the two are happily pursuing their relationship.

But nogitsune are prowling the city, on the hunt for a fugitive child with powers of her own–and the Unseelie bard Elessir has escaped from his vengeful queen, bringing with him a curse that lashes out to endanger Kendis’ closest friend. Now she must confront these dual threats to her city and her loved ones, along with the uncomfortable truth that there’s much more to her Seelie heritage than she knows.

It’s only a working draft of a blurb, but hey, it’s an incomplete working draft of a novel, so that’s all good. Hope it piques your interest, folks!

October 2, 2010 by
Bone Walker, Mirror's Gate, Short Pieces, Vengeance of the Hunter

Word count metrics update

I’ve been in another prolonged writing funk, which has been frustrating–so tonight I tried another round of throwing tiny bits of words at stuff. Got up to just over 200 by throwing small words at four different things, so I’ll take that!

So we’ve got 51 words into Chapter 4 of Shadow of the Rook, which is currently in the middle of an Enverly scene–his first since the events at the end of Lament of the Dove. Let’s just say Father Enverly has had his first actual religious experience, shall we?

Mirror’s Gate is still in Chapter 2, with Yevanya going to have a friendly little chat with her dead husband’s former teacher and colleague, which should set her up nicely to learn some disturbing things about what’s going on in the city of Istra. 57 words to that, and I gotta say, I rather like this fragment:

Genrek was a great hulk of a man, towering over her by many inches, and yet she had never found him anything but amiable in his gruff fashion. She always supposed it was not because he found her fragile and dainty; next to Genrek many things were, such as carriages, hills, and the smaller varieties of bear.

Over in Bone Walker, I’m still in Chapter 11, with Kendis and Christopher about to get hugely distracted from the question of whether Christopher can, in fact, cross Lake Washington. ‘Cause something is about to give them a disturbing little phone call. 52 words there.

And last but not least, in the still untitled Warder-universe story of Elizabeth and Ross, Elizabeth is realizing that she has no business snarking on a man who’s just told her his dead sister was the magical defender of the city. Not when she is, herself, a psychic. 67 words here.

So yeah. 227 words total. Not much overall, but something!

August 29, 2010 by
Bone Walker, Mirror's Gate

Ooh hey, progress

Looks like I’m back to trying to lure words out of my brain a small dribble and drabble at a time.

Tonight, at least, I managed to throw words at both Mirror’s Gate and Bone Walker, though, so I’m calling that a win! Still in Chapter 2 on the one and Chapter 11 on the other, but between ’em I got roughly 500 words tonight. So I call that a win!

Mirror’s Gate:
Written tonight: 267
Chapter 2 total: 2,231
Mirror’s Gate total (first draft): 6,014

Bone Walker:
Written tonight: 293
Chapter 11 total: 682
Bone Walker total (first draft): 30,683

July 19, 2010 by
Bone Walker, Child of Ocean Child of Stars, Mirror's Gate, Shards of Recollection, Short Pieces, Vengeance of the Hunter

Yesterday's writing metrics

I’ve hit another dry spell lately, which is annoying, so yesterday I decided to try to do something about that. Throwing small chunks of words at everything I have in progress seemed to help. I did at least over my usual desired target quota of 500, even if those 500 words were scattered across six works in progress. 😉

It all means no real major progress in any of it, but at least there was small pointer advancement! We’ll see what I can do today.

Written on Mirror’s Gate, Chapter 2: 157
Written on Bone Walker, Chapter 11: 174
Written on Shards of Recollection, Chapter 1: 150
Written on Child of Ocean, Child of Stars: 26
Written on Shadow of the Rook: 30
Written on Untitled story about Elizabeth, psychic chick of size, and Ross, brother of a dead Warder: 34
Total words written yesterday: 571

June 27, 2010 by
Bone Walker

Unexpected character brainstorming FTW!

Determined to write a couple hundred words for Bone Walker tonight, I lamented to that I had a logistics problem to solve as I started the new chapter. The issue with writing several characters who don’t normally drive, you see, is that when I have a situation that requires them to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible and magic is not immediately an option, and I’ve sent what members of the cast who are established to have vehicles off to do off-camera things, I’m kind of screwed!

I explained to Dara that I needed to get Christopher and Kendis from her house in Sand Point over to the East Side, and that time is of the essence for reasons on which I shall not elucidate, because of spoilers. She wryly suggested that in the Faerie Blood universe, maybe we do actually have the Mosquito Fleet of boats on Lake Washington, or that I could make a faerie/ferry pun of some sort, which might bear investigation later if certain long-term plans come to fruition for the future of these characters. More immediately, though, the best solution seemed to be just have them take Millie’s car.

Those of you who’ve read Faerie Blood may note that at no point in that book did I ever mention that Millicent Merriweather actually owned a vehicle. So when I mulled what sort of vehicle she might drive, Dara promptly started throwing me all sorts of amusing suggestions about cars for a woman of her age and history. As a result, I have decided that Millie has a 1982 brown Volvo, which used to belong to her husband and which she now drives as little as possible because 1) a Warder should walk her city’s streets, not drive them, 2) the car makes her miss her husband, and 3) driving is annoying in general. Especially in Seattle. 😉

This will explain why the hell Kendis has spent the last two months in Millie’s company and never realized she had a car at all. It will also give me an excuse to have her and Christopher get into her car and take enough of a moment to double-take over how wait, what, Millie listens to Nirvana?

I’m tellin’ ya, Millie just keeps unfolding like a flower. Also, character brainstorming with your spouse rocks.

June 2, 2010 by