September 3rd, 2010
My current goal for Derelict is to finish it by year’s end. Not just “I have a complete draft,” but “I have a complete draft that has been through several revisions and is now in good enough shape for me to start submissions while working on my next book.”
In some ways, I’m scarily close. 90K words written, and over the past couple of weeks I’ve basically hashed out the ending — which has been the main hang-up for the last, oh, year or so. Of course the ending I’m going with means that most of the beginning, after first couple of chapters, gets to be yanked out and sent to the chop shop, where any usable parts will be sold to the highest-bidding chapters. But I digress.
It is worth noting that, in other ways, I am scarily not close. Most of the book is going to receive a pretty harsh shuffling; there will be many casualties among the scenes currently written, a lot of stuff needs to be rewritten, and some things I’ll just have to see when I get there. I think four months will do the trick, though.
Tags: Derelict, word count, writer's block, Writing
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September 2nd, 2010
Do you like zombie stories? Good. Go here.
I was introduced to this blog via Patrick Rothfuss’s blog. I read the linked post, liked it, and started reading from the beginning. It is riveting. I’m about halfway through the blog now (well, what there is so far) and signing off for the night.
Don’t forget to read the comments. They add a lot to the narrative.
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July 16th, 2010
Goodbye, world. I’ll see you in a week or so when the beta runs out.
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June 12th, 2010
Let it be known that, at 89,110 words, I am shutting the current draft of Derelict down and doing a ground-up rewrite. (Oh, and I think I’m over my writer’s block.)
I don’t like to blog about writer’s block when I have it. It’s almost like writer’s block is some sort of shameful thing which, if I was a REAL writer, I’d be able to overcome. (To some extent this is the case. Being a professional means having deadlines, and staying a professional means keeping them.)
I’ve been blocked pretty bad on Derelict for a while now. I’m not anymore. Part of this is that I now have a decent laptop on which to write, meaning I can write wherever the flip I want. Part of this is that I’ve started working on other projects I have in my head. You’d think working on three completely different books at once would mean that I’m getting less done on the main project, but in this instance that’s not the case. (Mostly because anything > 0. Results may vary when I finish being not blocked.) Another part of me being un-blocked is that I had a nice chat with my sister-in-law on the topic of writing, and that got me thinking about it again. (I wrote about a thousand words that night for the first time in months. Yay.)
What finally fully unblocked me, though, is a product of my becoming partially unblocked. Digging through the document again, I’ve come to the conclusion that Derelict needs a much larger rewrite than I was originally planning. Simply put, I’m gutting the oldest parts of the plot. The characters and core idea of the original short story are being carried forward; the plot, which I’ve been trying to make into the plot of the first part of the novel, isn’t. It just doesn’t fit anymore.
So, today I’m starting a new file for Derelict. This file currently contains — hang on, lemme count — yeah. This file currently contains zero words. I am going to rebuild Derelict in it, and it will grow quickly at first; I would guess that somewhere around 60% of the old document will fit into the new one with a minimum of rewriting (albeit some significant rearranging). Some scenes will have to be discarded entirely. (Some scenes I was pretty sure I was going to discard when I wrote them, but that’s the nature of the beast.) There will be quite a lot to write anew, but I’m looking forward to it.
Tags: Daria, Derelict, Emily, word count, writer's block, Writing, writing habits
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May 9th, 2010
If I mention that I’m posting again, I’ll jinx it, so I won’t.
I got a slew of new books the other day. Though not yet done with CJ Cheryh’s Rider at the Gate (though now I am: great book), my wife and I went out and dropped a bit of our tax return on about another shelf’s worth of books. In my case (I’m too lazy to link right now: check back later) my new books include the new Hitchhikers book (And Another Thing), Dan Wells’ debut novel (I Am Not A Serial Killer), Pratchett’s Going Postal, and a double edition of Wicked and Son of a Witch. So far I’ve read Serial Killer and Going Postal, and am now re-reading Making Money now that I’ve read the prequel. I hate that I started reading Making Money before I knew it was a direct sequel, but it was too good to put down; and a year is just about right for going back and reading the prequel and re-reading the book in question. There were still a couple of moments that made me sad, though. Have I mentioned how odd I am about spoilers?
On another note, I’ve started updating my Shelfari again. Pretty neat site, love the concept. My readings for this year are accurate (and boy howdy I’m not getting much read); my pre-2010 reading list is massively incomplete, and the reading dates are mostly guesswork. But I digress. And I’m off to run a gaming session.
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April 6th, 2010
I thought I’d kicked the habit. But now there’s a new release.
Well, I guess I’ll see everyone in a few months.
Current music: The default DF music.
Tags: cool stuff, current music, Dwarf Fortress
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March 17th, 2010
I get sucked into WoW for a month, I get back, and bam! Twenty porn sites register user names on my forums.
I do believe I’ll be switching to a forum software that lets me, I don’t know, moderate account creation or something. In the meantime, what forums?
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January 27th, 2010
Most of the RSS feeds I watch tend toward the long side. Generally this is a good thing. I enjoy reading the wide variety of articles at Tor.com; I like reading lengthy Scalzi-rants or game reviews by Shamus Young. Sometimes, though, I just need a bite-sized chunk of amusement to pick me up.
Historically, these bite-size chunks have been most frequently proffered by webcomics. For the last several months, I’ve been subscribed to F My Life. A frequently hilarious site, FMyLife is a place where people come to offer twitter-like explanations of why their life, at that very moment in time, sucks. Really, its only significant downside is it makes me feel like a horrible person for laughing.
Enter It Made My Day. It’s pretty much the same thing, except instead of horrible happenstances it’s happifying ones*. IMMD.
*Interestingly, some IMMD posts look a lot like FML posts, the notable difference being that the author ended with IMMD instead of FML. This says things about psychology and stuff.
Tags: cool stuff, reading
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January 26th, 2010
Well, I’m not feeling good.
I’ve been engaging in a cookie-hurling contest with myself since around midnight, and now Kat’s joined the fun. We’re really hoping it’s something relatively benign (read: non-contagious) like food poisoning.
Last time I had food poisoning (from a bad muffaletta), we discovered that a weak tea of apple cider vinegar actually worked really well on it. (Apple cider vinegar, it should be noted, is a home remedy for everything under the sun. Which makes me distrust its efficacy, but in this case it works.)
Unfortunately we have no ACV at the moment, so on the off chance that it is food poisoning we’ve both dosed ourselves with lemon juice. “The basic idea,” as I said to Kat, “is to f*** up our digestive tract so bad that anything in there s***s itself and dies.”
So maybe I’m a tad profane when I’m not feeling well.
Speaking of which, if you’ll excuse me . . .
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January 24th, 2010
After about a week of not being able to check my RSS reader on anything resembling a semiregular basis, the number of unread BoingBoing articles was over five hundred. And, though I realize that two to four hundred of those probably would have interested me, at some point there must come a limit; and though it killed me to do it, I clicked “mark all as read.”
I have declared BoingBoing bankruptcy, and am slightly saddened. But mostly relieved. I mean, five hundred articles? Really?
Tags: various forms of bankruptcy
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