Wednesday

Me: Cazaril, that’s about six too many hairballs. I’m calling the carpet cleaners.

Cazaril: Hmmm? Did you know there’s a bird outside this window? I bet if you let me out I could catch him.

Nimue: <bored sniff> You have no claws and almost no teeth. You’d never survive. <thinks a minute> Yes, slave human, let him out.

Me: No. He has no claws and almost no teeth and there are raccoons and foxes around. I’ve seen them.

Nimue: Whatever. I have more important things to do. <naps>

Me: Right. Now I get to move the office furniture around and make sure all the computer cords are out of the way.

Cazaril: Yay! Cords! Can I play with the mouse?

Friday

Me: Cazaril, that is my knitting. It is not a cat toy.

Cazaril: What? You didn’t get out the fishing pole toy the very instant you came into the room. <looks pathetic> Without a fishing pole toy, I have to make my own fun.

Me: <sighs> <retrieves fishing pole toy from library, where it has mysteriously relocated><plays with cat>

Cazaril: You know, I really like it with all the furniture pushed out to the edges of the room like this.

Me: Enjoy it while you can. It’s only still like that because the carpet is still damp.

Nimue: Speaking of damp carpet, my favorite sun spot is still wet. Make a lap, slave human, so I have somewhere warm to sit.

Me: You’ve taken over the couch. Isn’t that big enough for one small cat?

Nimue: Lap. Now.

Me:…

Nimue: <naps>

Saturday noon

Me: Well, that’s the dishes and three loads of laundry and some work on the book done. I’m going to sit down for a minute with the iPad.

Cazaril: Weren’t you going to move the furniture back and write that blog post?

Me: I have a couple of hours yet before I have to leave for the concert. I can take a few min… Hey!

Nimue: You have made a fine lap, slave human. I will deign to sleep on it.

Me: I thought you settled on the couch.

Nimue: I am tired of the couch cushion.

Me: There are three of them.

Nimue: I am tired of all of the couch cushions. I have shed on all of them. Now I will shed on you.

Me: Don’t settle in. I’m getting up in a minute.

Nimue: That’s what you think.

Me: I’m bigger than you are.

Nimue: <stretches, unsheathing long, sharp, curved claws> Nice slacks you have, slave human. And nice furless skin under them. Be a shame if anything were to happen to them.

Me:…

Nimue: <naps>

Cazaril: Oooo, laps! Well, a lap. Can I share?

Nimue: <opens one eye> Try it and die. I have claws and you don’t.

Cazaril: Um, yeah. How about if I sit on the top half of the slave human?

Nimue: I suppose. <naps>

Me: Wait a minute, what… Mmmpf! Cazmpgh…furry mplbf…wah! Phew!

Cazaril: You don’t like me being a neck warmer?

Me: Neck warmers are supposed to wrap around the back of the neck, not the front. They are also and especially not supposed to interfere with breathing.

Caz: Oh, all right, I’ll move down a bit, but you have to shift your arm so I won’t slide onto the Nimmie-cat. She’s scary.

Me: Now look…

Caz: <purrs>

Me: Well, at least I have a hand free for the iPad.

Cazaril: You know, you could scratch my ears any time now.

Saturday, several hours later

Me: Aack! I have to leave for the concert! Move it, cats!

Saturday, midnight

Cazaril: You’re back! Finally! I’ve been sitting here for hours.

Me: I am fatootsed.

Nimue: Fatootsed enough to forget my medication?

Me: Not quite. Open up.

Nimue: <does imitation of furry eel and slides into miniscule opening under couch>

Me: Come back here!

Me: <several hectic minutes later> Gotcha! <pills cat> Now for bed.

Cazaril: Yes, come and make a warm spot for me to sleep on. I’ve been waiting days.

Nimue: Weren’t you going to write that blog post?

Me: Aaack!

Cazaril: It’s one in the morning and I want my sleeping spot. Do it tomorrow.

And that, folks, is why I have no proper writing blog post this morning.

As some of you may recall, back in September I had a three-day visit from a team of video and publicity people, sent by my ebook publisher to shoot footage for some publicity/informational videos. Those vids are now up on YouTube, so I thought I’d post links here for anyone who’s interested.

The first one is the “Meet the Author” video, which is mostly me blathering on about writing. It has a couple of great shots of Cazaril, who is far more photogentic than I am.

Meet the author = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3xiJXLVSe8&feature=related

The second one is about the closets my sister Carol painted, and has some great shots of the Oz closet, the Narnia closet, and the Peter Pan closet – that’s the one they had me walk down the hall and into (they must have really liked that shot; it’s in both videos).

Closets – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhVRGVgj_WQ

Have a great day; see you again on Wednesday!

Second, one of my cousins is taking a marketing class and needs a variety of people from all over to answer a survey. It’s only two questions, so if you have a minute to pop over, it would be much appreciated.

And speaking of the book, I thought maybe folks would like an update. I’m supposed to be finished by next Monday. I’m not completely sure I’ll make it; it took me 17 chapters to get them out of town this time, and the outbound leg of their trip is taking a lot longer than I expected, mainly because it has suddenly dawned on me that I have a trilogy’s worth of plot lines to bring together in the last ten or so chapters, and I’d better get started.

For those who are interested: there will be quite a bit more of the mammoth in The Far West than there was in either Thirteenth Child or Across the Great Barrier, and I apologize for making you wait so long for it. Also, I finally talked my Cathayan Master Adept character into paying a visit to Mill City (she was supposed to show up in Across the Great Barrier, but she absolutely refused to waste her time that way). It’s a very short visit, unfortunately, but it means that there will be at least a little more about Hijero-Cathayan style magic and the Cathayan Confederacy.

Once the first draft is done and turned in, I get to take a short break (emphasis on “short”). I’m planning to be at Wiscon this year, though I’m not on any programming, and Elizabeth Bear, Lois Bujold, and I will be giving a pre-convention writing workshop for Fourth Street Fantasy convention in June. Somewhere in there, I’ll have to have a talk with my agent about the perennial What To Write Next question. I’ll probably get the editorial revision requests in July or early August, which means odds are good that they’ll overlap with the release of Across the Great Barrier, and since I really don’t want to wait until September to start Whatever The Next Book Is, I’ll probably be too busy to think straight for a couple of weeks.

Minor miscellaneous jobs include the aforementioned update of the web page, reviewing the spring royalty statements (which are due at the end of April and May) and finishing the update to the royalty tracking database, a long skull session with my agent regarding all sorts of subrights, and swapping out the research materials for the last three books from the shelves near my computer to the main reference shelves (which are farther away). I also will probably need to do a fair amount of research for Whatever The Next Book Is, one way or another. Oh, and updating my Quicken categories to make next year’s taxes easier, because they changed some of the lines again.

And that’s just the writing stuff. There are dust T. Rexes under the bed, I have about eight loads of laundry stacked up, and there are still at least four large boxes of my mother’s fabric stash to sort through and perhaps turn into something wearable. I have ongoing paperwork to do for my mother’s estate, and I really ought to plan something for my Dad’s 91st birthday besides a phone call! If I’m going to plant basil this year, I need to get the seeds started now, and dig over the garden as soon as it stops raining. The cats need vet appointments for their annual shots. I am at least 400 books behind on my To Read shelf. And let’s not even talk about the UFOs (UnFinished Objects) that are my knitting and cross-stitch projects.

In other words, my life is pretty much like everyone else’s – full to bursting with Stuff To Do, and unlikely to change any time soon. But right now, I have a hot cup of tea, one cat on my lap (who is purring loudly because she is making me sit sideways to type, which always pleases her greatly) and another cat perched on top of the computer pillar in Standard Cat Meatloaf Position #3, and I’m going back to finish up Chapter 22. Life is good.

I mulled it over for a few days before I figured out why I was having so much trouble coming up with an answer. See, the problem is that I really, really like my creature comforts:  hot showers and central heating and air conditioning and the internet (and all the rest of the high-tech toys of modern life) and so on. And there aren’t very many times and places that have those things, and the ones that do…well, I lived through those, and my memory is pretty good. I don’t really see a need to go back ten or fifteen years to do on-the-spot historical research when all I really need is to look up the occasional fact. (Go back fifteen years and arrange to buy a big wodge of Microsoft stock, maybe, but not for historical research.)

Really, it comes down to the fact that I’m a writer, not a historian. I care about odd details of everyday life and peculiar historical events because they are useful in my work, not because they are my work. And I learned long ago that I don’t actually have to have personal experience of something in order to write about it. Which was a great relief to me personally; my entire genre would disappear overnight if “you have to have done it yourself” ever became a requirement for writing about dragons and magic and so on.

Even people with a strongly kinesthetic learning style don’t have to murder anyone to write a murder mystery. There’s a reason it’s called fiction – no matter how gritty and realistic the story, a lot of it is still made up out of the writer’s imagination. Besides, I don’t write historical fiction. I write historical fantasy, which ranges from the sort of thing that is historically accurate “secret history” through alternate histories of varying accuracy to things like Lois Bujold’s The Sharing Knife, where the only thing that’s the same is the geography.

My stuff is somewhere in the middle of the range. Depending on the story I want to tell, I play fast and loose with the effects of real, acknowledged, everyday magic on historical events (which, realistically, would probably result in things being very, very different starting from whenever real magic was discovered). I don’t do carefully extrapolated “make one change in real history and work out in meticulous detail what happens from there” alternate history – if that’s what people are after, Harry Turtledove has a long list of really fine books that will keep them happy.

I still do lots of research, though. If something in my story is going to be different from real history, I want to do it on purpose and not by accident. More than that, though, is the fact that consistency is one of the fantasy novelist’s most useful and effective tools, and the easiest way to make one’s worldbuilding consistent and complex is to use what’s already there in real life. But I don’t need to go look at it in person. I can get everything I need while sitting in my comfy chair with my cats sleeping on my legs. Books are a grand thing.

Naturally, the very first thing that happened after I sent the thing off was that I spotted four typos and a missing word that I really should have taken care of during the clean-up. And got a quick note back from one of my dedicated first-readers, pointing out even more. Such is life.

Now I have a week or two to catch up on everything that’s been hanging fire during this mad rush to finish the book (i.e., laundry, dishes, errands…) But today I am going out with Lois for a celebratory dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, and tomorrow I am taking my knitting up to my sister’s so I have something to do while cat-sitting. (Cat-sitting for my sister’s aged and somewhat neurotic cat involves hanging around for a couple of hours “keeping her company” while she hides under the bed. It appears useless, but if one doesn’t do this, she stops eating.)

The plan after that is to spend a month to a month and a half doing research and planning on the next one (for which I am still grubbing around looking for a title…one of my first-readers wants something with “Exploration” or “Expedition” in the title, but I want something like Circuit Magician that’s both a job title and has a suggestion of magic about it. Oh, well, I don’t actually need a title for another year or so…it can stay Frontier Magic Book 3 until then.)

Research reading is a review of several titles I’ve already been through on Ice Age megafauna and post-Ice-Age North American ecology, a thorough reading of the (abridged, unfortunately) copy of the Journals of Lewis and Clark, and a run-through of a wide variety of titles recommended by other folks on everything from guns and clothing styles to diaries of settlers to even more overviews of the history of the 1800′s in the U.S. and elsewhere than I’ve already gone through.

I do, of course, already have something of a plan for the final book, but it has changed quite a bit since the original plot outline for the trilogy, which was extremely sketchy anyway. And even though I know I won’t be following it, I need that outline. It’s how my process works.

So…a couple of weeks of catch-up and clean-up, and then I’ll have revisions in hand, and after that, on to the next one. Meanwhile, I’m walking around the house picking up odd socks and cat toys and breaking out in a random grin and saying loudly to the nearest cat, “Hey, you, I’m DONE!” Which is normal for the day after turning in a book, especially one that was this late and this hard to get to move.

Oh, and they’re coming to fix my stove on Tuesday. Life is good.

I am having to remind myself about once an hour that Dad’s taxes being done does not mean I can run out and take on a new project. After all, I still have my own taxes to finish (though by comparison, they should be simple), as well as a book to write, lots of life maintenance to do (if I don’t run the washing machine and the dishwasher by tomorrow night, I will have nothing left to wear or eat off of), and a lot of other ongoing things that take up time. But I’m feeling giddy enough that I keep wanting to go cast on a new knitting project (though I have three on the needles right now, and that is enough!) or dig up some more garden space (not allowed until I finish planting and weeding the existing garden space, thank you very much), or call and ask six friends over for tea (getting ready for tea, the way I do it, takes at least three days of cooking and cleaning in preparation, and another one cleaning up after).

Fortunately, at this exact moment, I am incapable of doing any of these things, because Nimue is sitting in my lap, purring. This means I have to twist sideways to type, but it also means that I cannot get up and do something stupid like dig over more garden or cast on yet another knitting project (the three in process currently are a striped sweater, knit sideways in one piece, a sock, and a Shetland lace shawl. Just in case you were wondering).

Nimmie is sixteen (we think; she was rescued off the street, so we’re not positive) and on both hyperthyroid medication and the special kidney diet food, so I spoil her every chance I get because I don’t know how many more chances there will be. Though really, she is doing very well for an elder cat lady. She can still cuss like a truck driver, as she demonstrated the other day when Evil Enemy Cat #2 dared to pause in front of her window. There is nothing whatever wrong with her lungs or vocal chords.

This is Nimue, curled up on top of my desk and my good sweater, with her paws over her nose and no particular interest in posing for the camera:

It was the best angle I could get at the time.

So he’s been trying to get me up several times a night. To play with him. (How I know this is, I made the mistake of gettng up once, because I thought I’d forgotten to feed him. I hadn’t. He ran into the living room and stood over the feather toy expectantly. At 3 a.m. Darned cat. Yes, I know it was dumb to encourage him.)

He has also figured out that if he walks on the buttons of the scanner/printer/photocopier, it will make all sorts of interesting noises and get my attention. I finally unplugged it.

And in the middle of working on a difficult transition scene yesterday, I heard this little metallic *clink*. I looked around. There’s Caz, standing on the file cabinet behind me, looking innocent. I type. *clink* Again with the innocence. I pretend to type while sort of looking back over my shoulder, and this time I catch him…very deliberately and carefully pushing my double-pointed knitting needles onto the floor, one at a time. (I’ve been knitting socks lately; you need five double-pointed needles for that. I’d finished the first of a pair the day before, while staring grumpily at the computer screen trying to figure out how to avoid writing that transition scene I mentioned. I hate doing transitions.)

He looked really hurt when I picked all the needles up and stuck them through the yarn, so he couldn’t just shove them around. And then he came over and bashed and purred and walked on the keyboard. Silly beast.

Instead, I have paperwork. Estimated taxes are due next week, and I have to make sure I have enough in the bank account to pay them. I also have end-of-the-month bookkeeping to catch up on from May, and a bunch of filing (I loathe filing!), mail, and e-mail to deal with. And a chapter to finish, if I don’t want to get behind schedule.

So, naturally, I am blogging instead of doing any of those other productive things. I am tempted to claim that this is the natural perversity of writers in action, but I think it’s really just the natural perversity of people.

When you’re working on a book, two weeks is not as much time as it sounds. I’m hoping to use the time to get back some of the momentum on the sequel to “Thirteenth Child.” I’m currently at the stage where nothing sounds good, nothing looks good, the plot seems as if it’s either trite or non-existent, and I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to read any of this drivel, ever, especially since it can’t possibly live up to the last book.

The advantage of having been a professional writer for getting on for 30 years now (good grief!) is that I recognize this. It’s a stage. It happens every time, with every book, and it will pass.  Unfortunately, I also know that there’s no way to speed up the passing, and no amount of reassurance will make me feel any better about it. The only way out is through.

So I spent today making a list of all the various plot-like bits and pieces that I have or know about, all the potential characters who may or may not show up, and various crunchy background bits I’d like to work into the story somewhere, if I get the chance. And then I sat and sneered at the list. Tomorrow, I will try to get it worked up into a more detailed plot outline than the pathetic one I’ve been using. Once I do that, I will give the plot outline to my cats to sit on, and get on with the actual writing. I’ve tried skipping the plot-outlining stage and the cat-sitting stage, but it never works. In some mysterious way, they are necessary to my writing process.

Creativity is a mysterious thing. Or maybe it’s just the cats that are mysterious.