The most interesting thing that’s happened in my writing life is a a couple of reviews of A Diabolical Bargain mentioning the timeliness of its having disease in it.
They approve. One even mentions that since it was published in 2015, that has to be total coincidence. (And, of course, it is. But you never know when topicality will pounce on you.)
I’ve sent my first manuscript to my first copy editor. I’m super excited and also terrified to hear back. Does it get any easier the more books you write?
(I know why. The normally voluble character is having to talk about something he really doesn’t want to discuss. And now that I’ve dragged him through that, the scene is in the mouth of a different character who I haven’t written in ages. But still, in the words of my favorite Farscape quote, why so difficult?!?
Well, I may have just pulled off a rather iffy scene. My character is reading the logs of six battle robots, chronicling a battle they participated in five years before. The bots recorded only orders given, actions taken by each bot in response to orders, damage reports, approach and retreat of targets, all in–well, it’s not in machine language, it’s in something about as close to Standard as BASIC is to English.
But the character reading the logs has a lively imagination and some experience with bots of this kind, and he “sees” in his mind’s eye the humans giving the orders, the paths of the bots over the ground, “hears” their occasional remarks to one another, and at one moment he “smells” in his mind’s nostrils the scent of sweat and a dangerous drug.
“–Martian sandroot? –he hoped not; even a Martian shouldn’t be using that stuff while on duty, and a Terran shouldn’t use it at all. It must be something else, or else just his imagination outdoing itself.)”
(Martian sandroot will appear in the next book, should I ever get that far.)
And I ran the chapter by my husband, who’s the only beta reader I have, and he said, “Yeah, that works.”
I hammered out a Valentine’s Day short story, but not in time to do the revision pass by Valentine’s day. So I’ve set it aside to do the revision pass later. It’s part of a back-burner project to do a set of holiday stories.
I’m also dealing with the chapter of my WIP novel where Things First Fall Apart for various subplots. It involves a lot of “midwriting” – stopping and outlining events as I crawl forward. But I’ve got one character who finds out she was disqualified from the test she passed, a second character who learns that the fix is in for the (completely different) test she’s studying hard for, so that she (and everyone else) will fail, and a third character who just had an important tool break, in a way that shows he needs a different tool – one that he fears he won’t be able to obtain.
The most interesting thing that’s happened in my writing life is a a couple of reviews of A Diabolical Bargain mentioning the timeliness of its having disease in it.
They approve. One even mentions that since it was published in 2015, that has to be total coincidence. (And, of course, it is. But you never know when topicality will pounce on you.)
I’ve sent my first manuscript to my first copy editor. I’m super excited and also terrified to hear back. Does it get any easier the more books you write?
Some parts get easier. Some parts get harder.
Why is the scene I’m currently writing so hard?!?
(I know why. The normally voluble character is having to talk about something he really doesn’t want to discuss. And now that I’ve dragged him through that, the scene is in the mouth of a different character who I haven’t written in ages. But still, in the words of my favorite Farscape quote, why so difficult?!?
Well, I may have just pulled off a rather iffy scene. My character is reading the logs of six battle robots, chronicling a battle they participated in five years before. The bots recorded only orders given, actions taken by each bot in response to orders, damage reports, approach and retreat of targets, all in–well, it’s not in machine language, it’s in something about as close to Standard as BASIC is to English.
But the character reading the logs has a lively imagination and some experience with bots of this kind, and he “sees” in his mind’s eye the humans giving the orders, the paths of the bots over the ground, “hears” their occasional remarks to one another, and at one moment he “smells” in his mind’s nostrils the scent of sweat and a dangerous drug.
“–Martian sandroot? –he hoped not; even a Martian shouldn’t be using that stuff while on duty, and a Terran shouldn’t use it at all. It must be something else, or else just his imagination outdoing itself.)”
(Martian sandroot will appear in the next book, should I ever get that far.)
And I ran the chapter by my husband, who’s the only beta reader I have, and he said, “Yeah, that works.”
So I hope he’s right.
I hammered out a Valentine’s Day short story, but not in time to do the revision pass by Valentine’s day. So I’ve set it aside to do the revision pass later. It’s part of a back-burner project to do a set of holiday stories.
I’m also dealing with the chapter of my WIP novel where Things First Fall Apart for various subplots. It involves a lot of “midwriting” – stopping and outlining events as I crawl forward. But I’ve got one character who finds out she was disqualified from the test she passed, a second character who learns that the fix is in for the (completely different) test she’s studying hard for, so that she (and everyone else) will fail, and a third character who just had an important tool break, in a way that shows he needs a different tool – one that he fears he won’t be able to obtain.