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valor of the healer

Bone Walker, Valor of the Healer

What happens when you don’t make quota

Well, I didn’t make it a whole month before hitting a day when I just could not make myself write anything. It’s frustrating, but it reminds me of two related and equally critical things I’ve had to learn to keep in mind when working on my projects.

One: it’s okay to have a day here and there when I don’t write anything. There are writers who can churn out several thousand words a day; I am not one of them. I do have a full-time day job, and that does slurp up a considerable amount of my daily ration of Brain. Especially during weeks when I’m running short on sleep, when I’m all thyroid-y, or both. Like this past week. I spent all of Saturday, pretty much, thinking “well gosh I should write something”, and wound up playing a lot of Unwell Mel and watching crappy movies instead.

Two: while it’s okay to have an off-day every so often, I can’t let myself default to that, not if I want to get anything done. So I made a point of writing a page in Bone Walker last night, and tonight, I yoinked some more words out of Chapter 20 of Lament.

I’m not bothering with posting actual numbers tonight, since I’m still sort of sleep-deprived and thyroidal. But this is me saying that yes, for the last two days in a row, Writing Things Did Happen. Slow, small writing things, but as long as they happen, I’ll get there in the end.

January 17, 2011 by
Bone Walker, Short Pieces

Oh hey look Chapter 20!

I’ve finally pulled through the end of Chapter 19, and now I’m in Chapter 20! I’ve noticed that Chapter 19’s the only one in this draft of Lament thus far to have actually gained a couple hundred words, but that’s okay–I’d actually pulled in content from Chapter 17, after all. Given how much I’ve edited out of the chapter to make up for that, winding up with only a couple hundred extra words works for me.

Chapter 20 is one of the smaller ones in the last stretch of the book, so I’m not sure yet how much I’ll edit out of it yet. But it’s good to get the momentum going again.

Meanwhile, I’ve pinged my editor userinfoserasempre to start the official conversation about what Drollerie and I will be doing next. We do not have official details nailed down by any means. However, interest has been expressed both in Bone Walker and in the shorter pieces set in the Faerie Blood universe.

Which leads me into thinking that Oscar’s story may well wind up in the FB universe now, and and that it could wind up being a novella. That’d work quite a bit for me. I’m thinking that Oscar’s story, Elizabeth and Ross’s story, and Millicent’s origin story would be a lovely trio of things to have in one book.

More on this to come!

January 9, 2011 by
Valor of the Healer

Writing activity for the 8th

Small progress through Chapter 19 of Lament, pretty much, since most of my day had to go to other activities. I’m on page 19 of 23 at this point, though, so if I apply myself I should be able to finish the word count reduction for this chapter tomorrow!

I’ve been continuing to mull Oscar’s story in the back of my brain, and while I don’t have a real core plot idea for it yet, I do have a couple of beginning ideas. One, it’s possible this story may be non-urban fantasy, by which I mean, contemporary fantasy NOT in an urban setting. It may be rural/small town, and specifically, coastal. Two, I’m keying off a remark userinfosolarbird made to me that has stuck with me: “tuba is piccolo for whales”. The idea here being that a tuba is one of the few mortal instruments that can dip down into the range of the deep, primal music I want to be part of the plot of this story. This implies that there will be Big Creatures involved with this story.

Possibly whales. Possibly dragons.

More on this as it happens, y’all!

January 9, 2011 by
Valor of the Healer

Keeping the editing momentum going

Not much in the way of raw word count reduction tonight, but I did make it through roughly six pages, and I am in the final third of Chapter 19 now. The best thing about this effort, I think, is finding one actual typo: a redundant use of a word in a sentence. And I found a couple other places where I used the same descriptive label twice too close together.

But that’s about all I had time for tonight since tonight also involved Irish session goodness! And it’s just after midnight now, and I have to go to bed.

Edited tonight: -138
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,586
Lament of the Dove revised total (fifth draft): 105,554

January 6, 2011 by
Valor of the Healer

Accountability, I has it

Two days in a row getting writing-related things done! So far, so good.

Today’s effort, scattered across several hours through the course of the day, was editing about eight pages in Chapter 19 of Lament. This puts me just shy of halfway through the chapter, and so far I haven’t lost much significant word count. We’ll see what the rest of the chapter does for me, though it may just be that I don’t need to whittle this one down all that much.

Which’d be nice, since it has some of my favorite Julian and Faanshi mileage in it:

Before Julian could say more, Faanshi stirred and whimpered, horror flickering across her countenance. All at once he grew conscious of the shape of her, of the press of her slight form against his own, and that at some point during their headlong rush her hat had gone missing. Her hair, uncovered, smelled of sweat and leather and pine needles.

“Carefully, girl,” he warned when her eyes opened.

“Julian?” Her voice was small and broken, and as her gaze shot up to his face she said his name again, with prayerful relief. “Julian!” Then she threw her arms around him, buried her face against his shoulder, and sobbed.

In consternation he froze, aware of something going loose and tender within him. After a moment his arms eased their grasp and shifted, as if of their own accord, to better hold her. “Tykhe,” he muttered. “Don’t cry.”

“I don’t mean to be a burden! Please don’t leave me!”

Hadn’t he promised to do just that on the run past Tolton, if she slowed him and Rab down or proved a danger? “I won’t,” said Julian nonetheless, that loose place within him broadening, threatening to rise into his throat, to cut off his speech. “I won’t leave you, Faanshi. It’s all right.”

When had he changed his mind?

That’s me, a sucker for making life difficult for the Rook!

Edited today and tonight: -91 (but that’s across eight pages)
Chapter 19 revised total: 5,724
Lament of the Dove revised total (fifth draft): 105,692

January 2, 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
Nanowrimo, Valor of the Healer

No Nanowrimo for me this year

Because I’m in crunch mode at work and that’s likely to overlap at least a little into the beginning of the month, and also, because beating Lament of the Dove into proper shape for re-submission to Carina Press is of highest priority for me and the writings right now.

‘Sides, you guys wouldn’t want me to disappoint Julian and Kestar and Faanshi. Especially Kestar. I mean geez, the man’s got a face as earnest as the day is long. I couldn’t possibly make that face unhappy. And given what I’m doing to poor Julian at the end of the book, he’s going to be really cranky at me if I don’t get him to the beginning of Book 2 as quickly as possible. ;>

Good luck to all who will be doing Nano, though! I’m likely to be going just as spare as you guys during the month of November, so I’m with you in spirit!

October 22, 2010 by