Deadlines

How many of your deadlines come from outside factors, how many are self-imposed, and how do you handle each?

The kids and I are coming smack up against the homeschool deadline for this year, which is a pseudo-flexible kind of thing. By that I mean that we're supposed to be finished with our 36-week school year by the end of this month, which gives the official correspondence teacher a couple of weeks to finish grading all the papers and assignments for the year, to get them done and grades submitted by June 15. But we've also paid for the teacher support through the end of June and can ask for additional months as we need them in case our school year needs to run longer for any reason. In the case of one kid, we may need an extra month, but in the case of the other, I hope to be done on time. We'll see. Either way, my personal deadline for this homeschool year is to be done by the end of May so I can have all summer to concentrate on writing issues, clean my house, sort through all the junk in the storage room and get things back under the illusion of control. I have no idea whether this will become reality or whether we'll end up stretching the school stuff into the summer as we have for the past two years. But I can always hope. Each summer, we gain a few more weeks of vacation time, which may or may not involve an actual vacation.

Then there's the writing deadlines. Since I don't have a publisher, my deadlines are mostly set by me and sometimes by tacit suggestions from Bob, who's a lot more realistic than I am. I have the tendency to set unrealistic deadlines, meaning I set them on a tougher schedule which I can rarely comply with in real life. For instance, I hoped to have this rewrite done by the beginning of May. Not only has that not happened, but I'm only halfway through the rewrite. Granted, there are a few extenuating circumstances, but I still feel that it should be going faster. Would I be able to go faster if I had an actual publisher's deadline to meet? Certainly it would help the family to take my writing time more seriously. But ultimately, my time management issues are my own, and I feel like I've been playing hooky. That must change, immediately. Bob can't market a book he doesn't have. And every week that goes by without the rewrite done is a week that he might have been able to make a sale for us and couldn't. So, shame on me. I must and will pull it together. I guess if that means the kids' school year drags longer into the summer, then so be it. Meshing of the schedules and getting all members of the family team to work together is a big challenge. But for me to figure out how to merge my writing into the larger family agenda is the biggest challenge yet.

I've Got a Bee In My Bonnet

This whole honeybee issue is really bugging me. I can't stop thinking about it. Every day I look at the news online, wondering what's happening with the bees. I hope they make it; I hope we all make it. But unless people wake up and begin to realize that everything we do has an effect on the environment, we may be in for a very rude awakening. I hate reading posts on the internet from naysayers who believe that they can go on spraying their pesticides, using their fossil fuels and polluting this planet without any kind of consequences. Scientific evidence says otherwise. This evidence has been available for decades. In fact, the whole ecology issue should be a no-brainer. (And yes, I did read the articles about the Varroa mites. They're getting more and more resistant to the pesticides, just like germs get resistant to antibiotics. We seem to be dealing with multiple causative factors in this bee issue, and I'm betting we need multiple solutions to solve the problem.) We've only got one planet, folks. Please, please, let's take care of it, and everything that lives on it. If we do that, then we're taking care of ourselves as well.

As to the book: no, the revisions are not finished. I scribbled as many notes as I could while talking to Bob on the phone, but other than that I'm working blind. I think I've addressed most of the issues we discussed, so we'll see what happens. I'm generally pretty strong in the revision stage; I hope that proves true this time. I guess I'm nearly halfway done. Should be closer than that, but we've had to put in some major homeschool effort in order to get finished on time. (The family got quite a bit behind while I was writing the first draft of the novel, so we've been hitting the books double-time to make up for it.) Two weeks ago both kids got sick, so we lost a lot of time there. And as part of my fifth-grader's science project, we're planting a garden. The new tomato boxes that the Huz built are going into place today, and then I can go shopping for the plants to go in them. We'll have home-grown tomatoes this year, dang it, even if I have to hand-pollinate them with a Q-tip!

Gotta go. I have assignments to make out, and maybe an hour of novel revision to do, and then I have to hit the hay because we're going to see a Spider-Man 3 matinee tomorrow.

Bee good to each other, and please send a few positive thoughts in the direction of the hives.

Earth Day and the Yellow Hummer

What could Earth Day and a Hummer possibly have in common? Well, it just so happens that the yellow Hummer in question runs on Ethanol. My husband just spent the past four days including Earth Day helping out at a local show featuring "big boy toys" like motorcycles, huge backyard grills, collapsible camper/trailers, backyard spa tubs, ATV's, the Hooters establishment, sandrails (racing dunebuggies) and other race cars in general, and, last but not least, the only Hummer in Idaho that runs on E-85.

Why ethanol? Where to start? It burns cleaner, keeps your engine squeaky clean, gives your vehicle a snappier performance (just ask the racers who've tried it--they're in raptures over the increased horsepower), and can end our dependence on foreign oil. Your car on petroleum fuel...ugh, sputter, cough, cha-ching! Your car on ethanol...vroom, vroom, feelin' good. Any questions? Check out this website and read all about it, plus take a gander at the strapping, healthy, corn-fed Hummer.

The View From the Top

Today we drove into the mountains. In part, it was so the kids could do some field work for various science assignments. The rest was probably due to the fact that we all love adventure, not to mention the fact that my husband has a 4 X 4, and he knows how to drive it. And drive it he did. Scared the **** out of me when we went down a road that turned out to have been washed out and swept by fire--I'm not sure in which order. We had to turn around in an alarmingly small space and go back to where the road had branched. There we tried the alternate route, but when we got close to the top of the mountain, we saw that the way ahead was blocked by snow. Only a short stretch looked to be blocked, but it was on a side hill, and deep enough that even with the wonder truck, we didn't dare try to make it through. So again we had to turn around and seek an alternate route. As dusk fell, we made our way back to the main highway. We eventually got home, but it wasn't by the paths we'd originally planned, and we never saw the view from the extreme top of the mountain because of the snow-blocked section of road. The view from that point was spectacular; or at least, I think it was. Maybe in the summer when the snow has melted, we'll finally be able to drive across that last bit and make it over the mountain and down the other side.

Kind of like the path to publication.

Synergy

How can it be April already, let alone a week into April?

The kids and I are booking right along on their correspondence school work. We have a few more weeks to go and a heavy workload at that; I don't know whether we'll have to drag the process into June or not. I hope not. It would be great to have a full summer off the school stuff for once, though my preference would be to do all the science for the upcoming year over the summer. That way, when it comes time to load the packets next fall, we can just reach into the file and pull the science lessons we need at the appropriate time. Or something like that.

I got a verdict from Bob about the initial draft of Beyond the Pale. Basically, it's like this: Beginning, fabulous. End, fabulous. Middle.... Don't worry, it's not toast. I just need to hike up the conflict in places, bring a few things closer to the beginning, intensify a couple of the relationships, that sort of thing. The basic storyline will stay the same, but we'll up the stakes in various ways--some subtle, some not. To tell the truth, I had the feeling that one of my villains was a bit under-utilized. I'm not sure how that happened, but he's now going to step more into the light. He should be a threat. How could a devastatingly handsome guy who isn't who he says he is not be a threat? I dropped a couple of balls without realizing it, but I'm ready to pick them up now.

I love what happens when Bob points out things I've missed in a novel. Sometimes when I finish a novel, even though I've had a crit group on point for months, we've all missed some of the forest for the trees. Just too close to the subject, I guess. Then Bob reads it and makes a couple of comments, and everything becomes clear again. It's almost always an "Oh, yeah," reaction--something I noticed once but then forgot about, or something I might have once meant to fix but then somehow didn't. A few issues take me by surprise, but after a little thought, I can see how the suggested change--or sometimes a different but similar change--will strengthen the book and take it up a notch. I don't like making mistakes, but I love what happens to the book when they're fixed.

That's where I lucked out. Not all agents are editors, and for the most part, they shouldn't have to be. But sometimes the right comment at the right time makes all the difference in the world. I don't need a lot of hand-holding and I try not to be the squeakiest wheel on the bus. However, a little bit of input can help a lot.

When you find an agent who will market your work to publishers, that's luck. But when you find an agent who refuses to settle for less than the best book he can get out of you and knows how to make that happen, that's synergy.

Change

We may end up moving this year. I hope we won't have to, because this move would come at a bad time for me; I'm busy enough as it is. I don't want to leave my friends, my house, the life I've built for myself here. And at the same time, a part of me knows it would be a great adventure to live somewhere else for a change. The east coast? The Great Lakes region? But that's so...far away. It would be a huge change for me, my kids, my elderly cat...

The Huz would be fine. His family moved a lot when he was a kid, so he's used to it. But not me. I put down roots. I lived with my grandparents in Montana for most of my life. I went to one school before college, all the way from K through 12. I moved a few times right after I started out on my own at age 18, but I've been in Boise for sixteen years. Ten of those years were spent in our starter home, and the last three years have been here, in the house I'm not sure I can bear to leave. This is the house I always dreamed about. I had a hard enough time leaving the starter home, but this...leaving this would be very, very hard. I love to travel, as long as I have my secure base to come back to. The more of myself I put into a home, the harder it is to let go.

The one thing I know for sure is that change will happen, whether or not I'm ready for it. I'm ready for some change, like publication, book tours and hard deadlines, but not for an entirely new base of operations. And what if I get the publishing contract right when we're about to move? Urk! Oh, well, bring it on. Better that than a lot of other, less constructive types of change.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

This week is always one of our busiest weeks every year. My Irish dancer daughter spends the whole day running around from one venue to another, participating in performance after performance with her dance troupe. It's a whirlwind of appearances, drives across and around town, hurried meals, flying curls and tired feet. I envy her, but I'm very, very proud of her. She's living her dream--right here, right now.

I'll also never forget the day she watched me typing for the first time and remarked, "Mama, it looks like your fingers are dancing." And so all artists make beauty in their own way....

Dance on, everyone.

Catching Up

This last couple of weeks, all I've done is catch up on things I let slide while I finished the last manuscript. The kids are enrolled in a correspondence school and have an official teacher, but for everyday intents and purposes, we function like homeschoolers. I have to get their packets ready to mail, make sure all the assignments are there, etc. Sometimes we get behind, and over the past few months, we got really behind. We'll be fine just as long as we get our work done by mid June at the latest, but we're having to make up now for some things that just didn't get done while I was lost in "book fog."

So I've had my break from writing, but it didn't really feel like a vacation. I'm starting to get antsy from not writing, and I need to get back into it soon! But I also need to take care of some of these other responsibilities as well. If it's a balancing act now, I have no idea what it'll be like once I'm published. Whatever happens, I hope it involves staff--like a housekeeper, private tutor, and personal assistant, maybe? Yeah. That'll be happening.

Follow-up To Last Tuesday

It's a small world, and the Internet has made it even smaller. Over the past few years since I first explored the web, I've corresponded with all sorts of people I might not have met otherwise. Last Tuesday the world shrank a little more, in a good way.

I mentioned a book by William Brohaugh called "Write Tight." The next day I was greatly surprised and thrilled to see that the author had noticed the mention in this blog and responded with some great news. His comments are below in bold:

Kathy, thank you for the kind and humbling comments about Write Tight. I know the author well because, um, well, I'm the author.

Write Tight is not out of print (ISI Books is the current publisher), though availability seems a mite scarce at the moment.

Good news: Especially because of your enthusiasm for the book, I'm excited to announce (and yes, this is, to the best of my knowledge, the first place it's been annnounced) that Write Tight will be coming out in paperback soon--schedule at the moment is fall 2007.

Good luck in your writing, and thanks again for your kind nod to Write Tight.

There you go, folks; you heard it here! To find out more about this great editor and author, check out his website.

Fact Checking

I just saw a made-for-TV movie based on a popular author's romance novel. It was set in Montana on a ranch. What bothered me was the way they portrayed the people--a bunch of cowboy-hat-wearing "westerners". Why do people tend to perceive Montana as being so very primitive and hokey? Montana has relatively few stereotypical cowboy types. Sure, there are a few here and there, but you can find "cowboys" in every state. I grew up in Montana and then went to college there. We didn't speak with a weird variation on the Texas twang. Most of us didn't wear plaid or checkered shirts, cowboy hats and cowboy boots. Blue jeans, sure, but with athletic shoes and any variety of shirt, blouse or sweater. I hate to disillusion anyone, but Montana isn't the last bastion of the Old West. Most Montana citizens (or former citizens) speak with a Dan Rather accent, not any variety of a southern drawl. Our belt buckles are usually not any larger than anyone else's--when we wear belts at all. Sometimes people have similar perceptions of Idaho. But neither Idaho nor Montana is really the "West". We're really part of the Northwest region, and the culture and accent doesn't vary that much between Boise, Portland, Seattle, and Missoula. If you go as far as L.A. you'll get a vastly different culture, but L.A. is kind of a law unto itself.

When I moved from Montana to Idaho, I didn't experience any type of culture shock. Nor do I experience it when I visit Oregon or Washington. The cultures are pretty similar in all four states. But I never read stories where people from Oregon or Washington are portrayed as gun-toting, boot-wearing, twang-speaking cowboys. No, that dubious honor seems to be reserved for Montana and sometimes Idaho.

I'm writing urban fantasy set in Ireland. I've done my level best to make my portrayal of Irish people as real-seeming and accurate as possible. I don't write in an exaggerated brogue. I communicate with Irish people via email to try to make everyday details as accurate as possible. I hope to have a native Irish reader if I ever get as far as sending out ARCs for Pale. I've actually been to Ireland, which helps. I've tried hard to avoid making stupid cultural mistakes in the novel. I'd hope anyone writing about a place they don't know much about would make a similar effort.

One of the reasons Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson books ring so true with regard to places and life in the Tri-cities is because Patty has actually lived there. It was a joy to read in the Mercy books about places I'd visited many times and know that the author got it right. When I watched the romance novel movie set in Montana, I couldn't help wondering whether the people who'd written the script had ever even been there.

This is not to say that in order to write about a place, you have to go there. But I do think that at least a little research is in order. If you can't go to the place you're writing about, you can watch a few video documentaries on the place, read a few books, or find a correspondent who lives there and will answer your specific questions about the area and culture. The realism it gives to your book should be well worth the extra time and effort.

Culture differences are funny. Once in a while, my agent will ask a question or say something that I don't know how to answer or interpret. Sometimes I make a comment that amuses him. Most of it is simply me being a dork, though some of it is probably due to small regional differences in the language or culture. But hey, he's been to Boise! It isn't just a dot on a map. One day, I need to visit New York City because I've never been there. I have a friend who lives "back east", and she kisses people on the cheek as a greeting. We don't tend to do that so much over here, so I'm a little awkward at it, but I'm getting better. Most of this is about taking the effort to learn about other people's cultures, habits and etiquette. How hard is that? It doesn't take so very much extra effort, it makes people happy, and helps avoid offending people out of ignorance. Shouldn't it be the same when writing books or movie scripts?

E-Prime and Writing Tight

I've seen a few discussions on various forums about the technique of writing in E-Prime. I must confess, I'd never heard of it until a couple of days ago. It sounded like the name of a planet! (Says the blonde who's not really blonde.) For everyone who's not a linguist or a sci-fi geek, E-Prime is actually a method of writing which removes all the forms of "to be". It's harder than it looks, given the many forms that "to be" can take. It also recommends against using contractions, but I don't think modern dialog sounds right without them. So how can one tighten prose while keeping that "real life" flavor and not starting to sound like Commander Data?

When I finish a manuscript--I think I've mentioned this before--I go through and try to remove as many instances of "ing", "ly", "and", "as" and "was" as possible. Over the past couple of years, I've almost broken myself of the frequent use of "ly" adverbs, so I almost don't have to check for them anymore. When I do have an "ly" lapse, it usually occurs in a cluster; I'm not sure why. I don't remove every "ly,", just enough so they're not used in excess. I'm also down to a minimal use of "ing" verbs as well. I do notice that when I take out "ing" words, I tend to reform the sentence into a compound one, which often requires the use of "and." And it really bothers me when I see "and" peppered over my page, and I feel compelled to remove as many of them as possible, which often results in a few of my "ing's" being added back into the mix. It's just like a good recipe. Too much or too little of one type of spice and you spoil the soup, so it makes sense to taste as you go along.

Bottom line: I'm picky about polish. I go through and highlight all the offending words so I can see how thickly they're scattered onto my page. Each pass nixes at least a few of the offenders so that by the time I'm done, I've removed at least a third to half of them. With any luck, I've left the ones that really help the prose flow the right way. I don't use E-Prime to such an extent that there are no "to be" verbs left in my...ah...verbiage. E-Prime might make some writing easier to read, but it can also change the original meaning of a sentence. There's a time for more active verbs, but there's also a time to simply ignore the rules and just...be. It's the writer's job to know when to do what.

For anyone looking for a good instructional book on how to tighten up your writing, I can recommend William Brohaugh's "Write Tight". Sadly, it's out of print, but you can probably still get a used copy through Amazon's marketplace. With such tough markets out there, I can't imagine why any writer--aspiring or otherwise--might not want to clean up her prose and give a manuscript just that much more of an edge. It's not about perfection (which I doubt exists anyway), but it is about being thorough, professional, concise, fast-paced and reader-friendly.

Existential Nightmare

Okay, so I'm trying to write urban fantasy. No problem so far. Then I spent three nights surfing the web for info on how an immortal might become mortal, and it snowballed into an existential nightmare. I blogged about it, using up about an hour for composition time. Then Blogger lost the entirety of the post. I can't get it back, so I'll try to recreate it, though it won't be the same. Never is, dang it! But hey, even if the post isn't here in exactly the same form, it did and still does exist. Take that.

The bulk of the information online seems to agree that most immortals wouldn't even want to consider becoming mortal, but if they did then the only method seems to be incarnation into a physical body, such as becoming a baby. Not much info there. However, there was plenty of info about the attempts of mortals to become immortal. The sticky part is that it all depends on your definition of mortal.

Enter a group of scientists who contributed to a recent article in Time magazine, claiming that every facet of consciousness can be linked to neuron and synapse activity in the brain. According to them, no brain activity = no consciousness = no soul. Personally, I believe they're wrong, wrong, wrong, but I won't know for sure until I die and I'm not in a hurry for that.

If we take the above theory but assume that souls do in fact exist, then it would follow that the traditionally accepted "immortals" like vamps, mermaids, and fae are actually the mortals since they supposedly have no souls, while the "mortal" humans are in fact the immortals since we supposedly have souls.

See what I mean by existential nightmare? And all I wanted was to find a way for an immortal to become mortal. Or rather, I wanted to find a way for a non-corporeal being to become corporeal rather than by incarnation as a baby. And immortal vs mortal is different than non-corporeal vs corporeal, apparently. Arrghhh!!!

Then I went to see Pan's Labyrinth, and it provided as many potential questions as it did answers. If you like dark fantasy, go see it but be aware that it's rated R and when I say dark I mean dark. Also, don't forget the subtitles. It's all in Spanish.

As to the prevalent historical theories: Personally, I always hated the assumption that Sidhe don't have souls. It just doesn't play well with the way I view the Sidhe. But I don't want to get into any fights or flame wars over who does and doesn't have a soul. Fortunately, we all have different neurons and synapses, and different opinions. If we didn't, there wouldn't be much of a point to existence in the first place. As far as I know, I am a soul and I currently have a body. That'll have to do for now.

Pale in the Mail

The manuscript is off to New York. It came to 93,074 words, which is a perfect length--not too long, not too short. Now I'll just have to wait and see.

I can hardly believe it's in the mail. Once I was able to focus on it exclusively, the writing went quickly. I looked back at my previous blogs to find out how long it took, and apparently I played around with the outline and the first three chapters for several months, starting in March of 2006 and then finally launching full force into the rest of the book in September. (I was still mostly writing on the third epic fantasy last summer.) So the bulk of the writing of Beyond the Pale occurred between September 2006 and January 2007, including edits. It seems strange knowing that it's done.

I've finished 2 1/2 other manuscripts between the year 2000 and now, but they were all part of the same epic fantasy trilogy. Each manuscript had an individual story arc, but I guess in my mind it felt more like one very long story that I still haven't quite finished yet. So it's interesting to have completed something so vastly different than what I've been writing for most of the past six years. In a way, I'm still not sure what to make of it. On the other hand, I have this very strong feeling that this is the book that's actually going to make it through the publishing gauntlet.

I called Bob last Wednesday and left a message to tell him the book was done, and he returned the call the next day. I told him I wanted to do the last little bit of polishing and then I'd send it out the first part of this week. I was hoping for Monday, but then the synopsis needed to be revamped, so it all went out today (Tuesday). He should receive the manuscript around Thursday or Friday since I sent it Priority Mail. He told me he liked the first half, so I'm hoping he likes the second half as well. It'll be interesting to see what publishers' reactions will be, but while I'm not going to hold my breath or make assumptions...I still have that strange half-panicky feeling that tells me we're on the verge of something major here.

Or it could just be all the caffeine I had to drink while I finished the manuscript.

Taking Back the Past

Memories can be funny sometimes. As a child, did you ever have a favorite toy or a favorite game that you later lost or your parents got rid of for some reason, and yet somehow that toy persisted in your memory for years and years? For me, it was the Which Witch game by Milton Bradley. They put it out in 1970, when I was four years old--just old enough to remember how much I liked it and how much fun I used to have playing it.

I don't usually go into deeply personal stuff on this blog, and I'm not going to now except to say that I've recently been learning how important it is to deal with unresolved issues from the past. For me, the Which Witch game represented something that was taken from me without my consent. I'm not trying for a laugh when I say that my grandparents burned the Which Witch game in a fit of religious fervor--simply because it had a theme that involved "witches". They acted according to their convictions and I can't really fault them for that, but thirty-plus years after the fact, I decided that I hadn't given permission for that game to be taken from me and, dang it, I wanted it back. So I bought one on eBay. It arrived today and I played it with my kids. They love it, and it meant a lot to me to be able to share it with them.

Does it live up to my memory of it? Yes...and no. Yes, it's played just the way I remember and it's as much fun as I remember. But it's also a lot smaller in size than I thought it would be. For some reason, it was much bigger in my head. My teenager tells me that it probably seems that way because when I played it, I, too, was much smaller. She's probably right. Once I got used to that little slice of reality, it was fine. I'm glad I reclaimed that part of my childhood.

Brenna, my main character in Beyond the Pale, has a past that comes back to bite her in the butt. She needs to deal with it, take it out, examine it in the light of day and decide how it's going to affect her in the future. Memory can be an incredibly powerful thing, depending on what you decide to do with it. You have to decide whether you'll have power over it or whether it will have power over you. And you have to be willing for it to be either better or worse than the picture in your head.

Here's some food for thought: If you find your memory-turned-reality drastically altered, did the reality change...or did you change?

Go, Dresden, Go

I just watched the pilot episode of the new Dresden Files TV show on the Sci-Fi channel. I liked it; I'll watch again next week. I had high hopes going in, and then my estimation of the writers went up further when they didn't automatically make the ravens the bad guys. (If you watched the episode, you'll know what I mean.) We'll see how things go in future episodes.

Today at the Moxie meeting I got most of the manuscript edits back. I still have a few more chapters due in this week, but I have enough to start working on inputting changes for the first several chapters. The corrections I made via my own paper editing over this last week are plentiful--not too extensive in terms of content, but I did notice a few details here and there that didn't agree with each other. The best part of the crit/edit process was when one of the Moxie said she stayed up until 3 a.m. last night reading the manuscript when she could have left the rest until morning. She said she'd gotten to "the good part" and didn't want to put it down. Yay! (Hsst...Val...what was the good part?)

Now that I've had my meeting, eaten dinner and gotten my Sci-Fi TV fix, I'm going to start inputting edits. The night is young.

Curve Ball and Victory

When the Garda press office replied to my last email question, I found out a little about their weapons regulations laws, and the news was a bit disappointing, at least in terms of my book. Let me see if I can clarify that without giving away the farm:

My main character needed to use a certain weapon. Turns out, the weapon is illegal in Ireland. That was the curve ball I got thrown at the eleventh hour and for which I had to come up with a work-around, just hours before I needed to leave for the crucial Moxie meeting. The ladies were going to view my last two scenes, which included the major climax. No, I couldn't just let things ride, bring what I had and try to fix the problem later. They needed to read the crucial scenes in as final, polished a condition as possible, because I intend to mail the complete manuscript off to Bob within a week and a half or so. And yes, the weapon in question was crucial to the climax scene. Terrific.

I did find the work-around, with a little help from the Huz. We took an earlier idea of mine and a new one of his and combined them, to good effect. Disaster averted for now. The Moxie ladies each have a copy of the complete manuscript to read this week, and we're meeting again this next Sunday. In the meantime, I'm going to read through the manuscript once and make my own corrections to whatever I find. I always do a final check to eliminate as many of the extra occurrences of "and", "ing", and "ly" as I can. Barring the Moxie finding any previously unnoticed glaring errors, I should have the edits and final polish done by next Wednesday or Thursday. Then it's off to the Post Office and we'll see what happens.

Miscellaneous Post-Book Ramblings

Beyond the Pale is done. Total word count 93,293 words, give or take whatever edits I may need to do after the Moxie looks at the manuscript tomorrow. I also need to fire off one last question to the garda PR office in Ireland.

This is my sixth finished manuscript, and I've already written the opening lines for the sequel, if it turns out that I need one. While I work up an outline for the new book, I'm going to pick up where I left off on Shifts of Perception, the third book of the epic fantasy trilogy that Bob's been marketing for me. Whatever happens with Pale, I want to finish the trilogy. It may yet find a publisher.

I just went to the Astronet website for the first time in weeks. Get a load of my horoscope for yesterday:

"Pursue your goals with fierce determination. Distractions have no place in your life at this moment; all you can think about is the desired outcome. With that kind of attitude, success is pretty much assured."

Assured? Can I get that in writing?

Now that I'm awake for the day and considering it's a Saturday, I'm going to haul the family out to celebrate. Maybe dinner and a movie.

All Over But the Shouting

Just one more scene left to write, and that one's just a brief wrap-up of the last tiny loose ends. Shouldn't take more than a few hundred words. I've already taken a Microsoft Word word count on the rest, and this book's going to end up between 90,000 and 100,000 words, which ought to be perfect. I haven't written a book this short in years.

The last two big scenes were very important, so I had to make sure they went right. I threw out all schedules for the last week and just worked, ate, slept whenever. I've had an ear infection this week and I'm still trying to kick that, but I just slept for about seven hours, so I think that helped.

On Sunday I take the complete manuscript to the Moxie for their final crits. With any luck, Beyond the Pale will be ready to mail no later than the 22nd, sooner if I can manage it. Then I need to do damage control on all the real life issues I let drop while I finished the book.

Connections

Thanks to Mhici, one of the wonderful Irish writers I met via the Forward Motion website, I've been able to get answers for most of my Ireland-related questions. This particular lady has been kind, courteous and helpful. She always answers in detail with just a little more information than I actually asked for, and it's always right on the mark and contains some valuable little gem of uniquely Irish insight that I know will make Pale a better book. I don't know what I would do without her.

Sometime within the last 36 hours, I sent her an email with several questions, and this evening I got her reply. I've already used the information to make a couple of corrections in the manuscript. Email amazes me. The internet amazes me. It's like magic. I can send a message to a friend in Ireland and get a reply back with only a short delay. Sometimes the entire exchange of emails takes place within a 24-hour period. So much faster than all the old methods of international communication, and so much less expensive than a phone call! When I was in Ireland in 1992, I sent a postcard to our house-sitters back in the States. My husband and I arrived home before the postcard did.

One of my questions involved some Irish language pronunciation, so Mhici's going to consult an Irish-speaking friend for me. Her help has been so far above and beyond that I really, really owe her one. Or several. I hope I can repay the favor someday.

Writing progress: I wrote one of the last three scenes of the book (over 3,000 words) on Tuesday night. It was a tough battle scene with lots of magic flying around, but some things about it didn't feel quite right. Last night I realized that it just wasn't working for me. I didn't feel comfortable leaving it as it was, so I scrapped it all and started over. I like the rewritten scene much better. It's also shorter, which should leave me a little more word count budget for the last major scene and then the brief wrap-up afterward.

Memory

The Huz just installed one gig of new memory on my computer, and it's working a lot faster than it was. It had a quarter gig, and apparently 52 processes load at startup. WTF? How could that many processes need to load at startup? Makes no sense whatsoever. After the book is done, I'm going to pick up a copy of Windows XP for Dummies and see if I can find out how to fix that. The Huz is a brilliant computer guy, but he...well, let's just say, he dislikes Windows. So I figure if these little maintenance issues are things I can learn to handle mostly on my own, I'll save him the hassle. I'm actually not too bad a trouble-shooter, considering I have no Computer Science background. (I'm sure programming bubble sorts in C and word processing in Superscripsit on a TRS-80 in High School doesn't count!)

Gad, can anybody remember Superscripsit? I shake my head in wonder. When I wrote my first novel, I was 16 years old. I'd taken Typing 1 and Typing 2 in high school, and just before I got ready to go off to college, I got special permission to stay after school a few times and use the Superscripsit program in the computer lab to enter that novel and save it to a floppy disk. Years later after the Huz and I were married and bought our first computer together (awww!) he was actually able to access those files on that floppy and bring them across into a spiffy new word processing program called Word Perfect. It didn't look perfect, but the data was there.

You know, the story of writing that novel and saving it for posterity makes a better story than the novel itself. The idea was cute, but the actual writing was...um.... You know the old saying that a novelist's first million words are garbage? Yeah, pretty much. I was no Paolini. But I really have to hand it to my teachers--they rocked. My English teacher used to deliberately ignore the fact that I was writing a novel during his class; as long as I could answer a question when he asked it, he let me alone. I'd make my own corrections and hand-copy those pages neatly, then take them to the school office, where they let me copy them on the Xerox machine. Then my English teacher critiqued the novel on his own time. He marked his crits and comments on these horrible blue rubbery copies of my handwritten pages; I still have them somewhere, I think. Later, after I'd gone into the Typing 2 class, I'd distribute my neatly handwritten originals to a couple of other students in the class, and the typing teacher would ignore the fact that the three of us were typing out my novel rather than the class material. As long as we produced typed pages, he didn't care. The Superscripsit saved on the floppy disc was the culmination of two years of work on this same novel, which I continued to tweak for the next eight years or so while I went through college and tried out a nursing career. Writing-wise, I switched from spiral notebooks to an electric typewriter of my own, but my second finished novel was the first one written entirely on a computer--the same one I mentioned before with the Word Perfect program. Blue screen, white letters. Ugh. At the time, I thought it was completely wonderful. I had no idea how rapidly the technology would advance.

The Huz makes fun of me because I use the "page width" setting to type--I mean input--my novels into the Word program I have now. I like it, okay? It looks like separate crisp white paper pages. Call it a quirk. I've got more where that came from.