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Short Pieces

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, 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, 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
Short Pieces

Meanwhile back on my still untitled story

My Psychic Chick story is still germinating in my brain, and tonight its heroine, Elizabeth ‘Ealasaid’ Breckenridge, who hides actual psychic talent behind a seemingly sham psychic-and-Tarot business, demanded I give her more words. So I gave her 547 of them, enough to move her first scene far enough along that she has now discovered two things:

  1. The story’s male lead, Ross Taggart, knew the instant he triggered her into having a vision that she’s the real deal, and
  2. Something very, very wrong has happened in connection to him.

I’m still mulling what that actual something very wrong is, but as of tonight, I’m pretty sure it has to do with the murder of his sister, who was the last Warder of the city of Providence, Rhode Island. Ross isn’t an active Warder himself, but he’s shall we say Aware of the Lineage, and therefore aware of magical things in general. So he ain’t gonna bat an eye at a psychic chick. All of which is going to be quite the eye-opener to Elizabeth. Muahaha.

I have also figured out by way of character development that Elizabeth has had to vehemently refuse to undergo any weight-loss surgery, despite pressure from her family and particularly her mother to do so. When you’re psychic and your visions can be triggered on casual contact, undergoing a major medical procedure which involves all sorts of contact all over your body just spells all kinds of trouble. I strongly suspect traditional anesthesia doesn’t work very well on her.

Eventually, I’ll give this thing a title! But it’s good to know that it’s a Faerie Blood universe story, that it’s set in Providence, and that my two lead characters are starting to come to life.

June 1, 2010 by
Bone Walker, Mirror's Gate, Short Pieces

That's all I got

When I find myself staring dully and tiredly at the screen and no words are flowing, that’s the signal that it’s time to go to bed. But I did at least make a few words go tonight! And even if about 100 words into each of these things doesn’t seem like much individually, it will at least add up if I keep at it. That’s good advice to keep telling myself.

Let’s see if I can do this again tomorrow.

Bone Walker:
Written tonight: 110
Chapter 7 total: 1,723
Bone Walker total (first draft): 18,457

Mirror’s Gate:
Written tonight: 115
Chapter 1 total: 1,417
Mirror’s Gate total (first draft): 1,417

Untitled short story:
Written tonight: 115
Story total: 615

February 22, 2010 by
Bone Walker, Mirror's Gate, Short Pieces, Vengeance of the Hunter

Finally, some more words

I’ve been frustrated enough with my months-long block on regular writing that I figured tonight I should try the multi-novelling trick. That’s helped in the past, and I felt it was long past time to try it again, just for the sake of advancing some pointers on various works on progress. I’ve mentioned before how it’s often helpful for me to just try to do little chunks at a time–and tonight, I was pleased to note that it worked again.

So yeah, a small number of words for Bone Walker, Mirror’s Gate, and Shadow of the Rook out of the novels in progress–and a few more for the as of yet untitled story about my Psychic Chick of Size. Whose name is, by the way, Elizabeth Breckenridge. Her male lead is Ross Taggart, and so far what I know about him is that he’s actually too heavy himself (because if there’s anything as rare as a fat heroine in a fantasy story, it’s an overweight hero) by thirty or forty pounds, and that he’s either a private investigator or a reporter or maybe a blogger. I’m not sure which yet. Waiting to see if anything pops out of my head as I throw words at the story.

And we’ll have to see if I finish it in time to submit it to and for their anthology.

Meanwhile, the word stats:

Bone Walker:
Written tonight: 109
Chapter 7 total: 1,613
Bone Walker total (first draft): 18,347

Mirror’s Gate:
Written tonight: 104
Chapter 1 total: 1,302
Mirror’s Gate total (first draft): 1,302

Shadow of the Rook:
Written tonight: 112
Chapter 2 total: 3,950
Shadow of the Rook total (first draft): 13,378

Untitled short story:
Written tonight: 266
Untitled short story total: 500

February 21, 2010 by
Bone Walker, Drollerie Press, Short Pieces

Right then, holiday is over and the new year has begun

I know I keep saying this, but let’s see if I can hold to it for a while now that the new year is under way, eh?

Back into Bone Walker tonight, with Chapter 7 underway. I’ve got me a Kendis with a head full of stuff she’d really rather not have to be dealing with all at the same time, and a bit about how the magic of Warding a city works, and a bit of Seattle geography all touched upon in the five hundred words I’ve written tonight. This felt good. Let’s see if I can do it again tomorrow.

Meanwhile, in case y’all haven’t seen it yet, we’re handing out free downloads of my story “The Disenchanting of Princess Cerridwen” right over here for the 11th day of Drollerie Christmas! I know, I’m already handing it out for free here, but said such nice things about the story that I really just sort of have to go “aw”. *^_^*;;

And oh yeah, did y’all see the new poll I have up in the sidebar? (Go here for those of you who are reading this from LJ or DW.)

Written tonight: 508
Chapter 7 total: 508
Bone Walker total (first draft): 17,242

January 3, 2010 by