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vengeance of the hunter

Bone Walker, Vengeance of the Hunter

Status update from VCON

Well, I think this is a new first for me: I’ve just spent practically all of VCON holed up making a mad dash through the rest of developmental edits for Draft #2 of Vengeance of the Hunter. I swear to gods, people, my editor? She’s made of solid gold awesomeness, and I’ll go on record here and now as saying that Draft #2 has improved considerably because of her. It’s still the shortest book I’ve ever written, but at 84K, it’s still a credible length for a novel.

(I did at least get to see a couple of things at VCON, though. I made a sweep through the dealers’ room and spotted a couple of books I liked the look of, one of which I’ve already bought in ebook form, the other of which I’m going to track down if I can. I would have gotten the paperbacks, except that my shelves are already pretty damn full, the lament of book geeks everywhere. And oh yes, I bought a new Doctor Who t-shirt, one which has all of the first 11 Doctors on it. And it’s weird to type that, rather than ‘all of the Doctors’, now that I know there’s a new guy on the way.

And I did go to the Turkey Readings today, which were awesome and full of win and LOL. Also, I did get to say hi to GoH Mur Lafferty, whose name I know from her work on the podcast Leviathan Chronicles.)

But anyway. Vengeance is in, though my brain is goo. The Editor of Awesomeness will be commencing her next round of edits on it ASAP and I expect to be on tap to charge through those as soon as she throws them back to me.

Those of you who are patiently awaiting updates on Bone Walker, I swear to god I haven’t forgotten you. Vengeance however has eaten my brain. So has the Not-So-Happyfun Medical News I got earlier this week, and the other reason I’ve more or less spent the entire convention hunched over my computer is that I’ve not been in much of a mood to make social noises at a hotel full of strangers.

Y’all will be getting an update on Bone Walker as soon as I can get my brain back. The next thing that’s likely to happen there is that I’m going to get the long overdue posters and postcards made, so stand by for an update on that by the end of this week, mmkay?

Now I think I need to sleep for a week.

Vengeance of the Hunter

Vengeance of the Hunter: TURNED IN

Internets, I am pleased to report that finally, finally, I have turned in a draft of Vengeance of the Hunter, book 2 of the Rebels of Adalonia trilogy, to my editor at Carina Press.

I have come away with a few lessons from this. The first of these is that writing to a known deadline has proven harder than I anticipated–not only getting the book done, but planning it in such a way as to produce a still fairly coherent draft. When I sent the book that became Valor of the Healer to Carina, I’d had time to polish the hell out of that. It was draft six.

This time, not so much. I was working pretty much right off the draft of the synopsis I’d sent in to my aforementioned editor, so I had a pretty decent overall idea of where the story was going to go–but holding to it, and keeping the words going, was a challenge.

And um, yeah, I sorta kinda blew my deadline. Not horrendously, but close enough that I’m now going to be hard pressed to plow through the developmental and copy edits when my editor hands them back to me so we can stay on schedule. Lesson learned: start Victory of the Hawk sooner.

Also, have I levelled up again in Writer by stumbling across a deadline, or what? I’m not the first writer to do so and I’m sure I won’t be the last, but um, yeah, my chagrinned face. Let me show you it. *^_^*;;

ALSO: surprising me deeply, this has proven to be the shortest manuscript I’ve ever completed, clocking in at around 76,500 words. Given that Valor of the Healer came in in its final form at 118K, you can imagine that I’m baffled by this TOO. This was me trying to apply my editor’s lessons from the work done on Valor to cut down hard on my natural tendency to verbosity, but I’m thinking at this point that I probably hugely overcompensated. I’ll have to find out when the requested edits come back.

Now, my style has tightened up somewhat since I originally wrote Faerie Blood, as well as the earlier drafts of Valor. Bone Walker came in pretty compact as well. And, Vengeance has a lot less of me setting up the characters since as of this book, I have introduced most of the major characters already–and I’m upping the stakes of what’s going on and expanding the scope of the action as well. So a lot of this book is plot-driven rather than character-driven.

But I’m introducing notable new characters as well and I’m not sure I’ve developed them enough yet. I’ve flagged this as a place where I need guidance, and am now on standby for my editor’s requested changes.

Internets, my brain, it is GOO. But Vengeance of the Hunter in its initial incarnation is DONE DONE DONE. More bulletins as the book begins to progress towards its shipping form. And meanwhile: stand by for further updates on the coming of Bone Walker!

Rebels of Adalonia, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter

Trilogy titles announcement!

With the agreement of myself, my agent, my editor, and the rest of the team at Carina Press, we now have final titles for my trilogy!

As of RIGHT NOW, the book formerly known as Lament of the Dove shall be henceforth referred to as Valor of the Healer!

Book 2, formerly Shadow of the Rook, becomes Vengeance of the Hunter.

Book 3, formerly Lone Hawk’s Flight, will be Victory of the Hawk.

And the series title over all will be Rebels of Adalonia.

I’m feeling quite happy about these titles over all, especially for Book 1, since that very nicely captures the whole character arc I’m doing with Faanshi in that part of the story. And I like the alliteration of the V and H words in each title.

I’ve been asked this on Google+, so I’ll go ahead and note here that the title changes were brought about for two reasons. One, because ‘Lament’ was determined to not really fit Faanshi’s character arc. This was in fact something that beta readers had brought up to me (and did I mention, YOU GUYS ARE AWESOME LIKE THAT), so when Carina raised the issue, it wasn’t surprising to me at all. Two, because ‘Dove’ was thought to be kind of questionable for the fantasy market. This, too, wasn’t really surprising. I also had a beta reader note to me that they felt that ‘Lament of the Dove’ actually sounded like a Western! And on a related note, especially given that a lot of Carina’s buying audience is coming out of the romance genre, I could also see people thinking ‘Dove’ has connotations of inspiration romance–which is definitely not what I’m writing.

So! Valor of the Healer it is. I get to make appropriate changes in the copyedit pass I need to do this weekend! And y’all be on the lookout for this to get incorporated into info right here on my site as well as in upcoming announcements as they happen!

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

Faerie Blood, Valor of the Healer, Vengeance of the Hunter

General news and also, word count

I’ve finally gotten my next round of royalties for Faerie Blood and Defiance, and I’m not terribly surprised that they are tiny. To all of you out there who have bought copies of these works this year, though, as always, I thank you for your support!

Along with the royalties, though, I have also gotten the news that Drollerie’s agreement for audio versions of our works has dissolved. So, sadly, this means that there will be no audio version of Faerie Blood for now. If I get any further updates about this, I will be sure to pass the word.

Over in the land of Lament of the Dove, there are still open queries on that. A couple are to agents, but the primary one of interest remains to Carina Press. I’m not expecting pings back from the agents at this point since it’s been long enough on those queries that either they’re not getting back to me, or else they’re so backed up that they’re not going to be able to do so in a timely fashion anyway.

My strategy for querying agents is, I think, going to have to change. I’ve been focusing on querying people who accept email submissions, but since I’ve pretty much exhausted the pool of people I’m interested in, I’m going to have to branch out to sending snailmail. And if Carina says no, print partials or fulls of Lament will be going out, too. But I’ll give it a little longer before Operation Paper Querying will have to go into effect.

Shadow of the Rook is the book that has my attention at the moment, just because Lament is the thing with the biggest active query. Like Lament, Shadow is taking its time organically growing in my brain; I’m only just now inching into Chapter 4, trying to figure out exactly how I’m going to have one of the characters who made it all the way through Book 1 survive for the bulk of Book 2. And I’m pleased to note that while I didn’t write nearly as much as I should have done this weekend, I have nonetheless accomplished some word count!

Written this weekend: 538
Chapter 4 total: 831
Shadow of the Rook total (first draft): 18,259