Today I began the book following June n Peaches. No title as of yet, but I managed to get kid-let off with Grandma to have enough peace and quiet to write 1,019 words. Yay!

I did set the end point at a more reasonable 80,000 words. 60 is really too short, even if I do get to the end. So, I won't consider it really finished until I go back and add what my Beta Readers tell me is missing. I'm pretty confident I won't manage to get it done by the writers retreat in July, since I do have a husband and kid-let. However, I am also confident I can get this done by the end of the year. Let's see, I wrote the last one to 60,000ish words in three months. I wonder if I can do that again...

</a>1019 / 80000 words. 1% done!

A friend was telling me today that he's having something of a midlife crisis. I confessed that I've never really understood what that means. He said, "It's like I'm looking around at my life and thinking, Is this all there is?"

I told him that by that definition I don't expect to ever have a midlife crisis.

We were walking down Sixth Avenue toward Bryant Park. Being there reminded me, as it always does, of the year I spent as a secretary at BPRC, struggling in yet another job that didn't suit me, thinking This is it. I'm done working for other people. It never works. It reminded me of how miserable Josh was back then, how we desperately tried to find local friends and community, how Xtina and I wrestled with the transition from long-distance to medium-distance and wondered why seeing each other more often wasn't making us happier, how money was always tight.

And now I have everything. So much more than I ever thought I might have. I hear there are kids who plan their futures; I never really did, or not in any plausible way. (I wanted to be a detective. I wanted to live in a self-sustaining agrarian commune. I wanted to create a language that everyone in the world would speak. But those are dreams, fancies, not plans.) I'm not sure I believed in the concept of myself as an adult. Somehow, without a blueprint, this amazing life has built itself around me. Such riches, such beauty, such wonder, such love! To contemplate it is to be both uplifted and humbled. I look around at my life every day and I'm blown away by how much there is. I don't expect to feel the slightest bit different when I hit "midlife", whenever that is.

I guess I got my crises over with early. Can't say I'm the least bit sorry.


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(mirrored from my author blog)

So I’m up to my eyeballs in revisions. I’ve put in my “think time” and I’m writing actual words at this point. I’m just past the halfway point of the novel, with three major scene rewrites still ahead of me and a number of small revisions left to make. I’ve informed the editor of my progress and scheduled a tentative delivery date of this first round of revisions. (We may go through several rounds.)

But guess what! The manuscript is not the only thing I have to deliver!

I also have to come up with a title, a series title, and cover ideas.

Fortunately, the editor likes the current title of the novel, Assassin’s Gambit, so it stays. Cross that one off the list!

Series title? I have no idea! I have to come up with one! It’s due by the end of next week.

As for cover, this is not entirely my job, but one of the things I love about working with NAL is that they work closely with their authors on cover design. This is a way better situation than some publishers who just slap a cover on the novel and if the author doesn’t like it, too bad. So they want input from me, and that means I need to do a lot of thinking about what I want the cover to look like.

I know lots of writers have envisioned the covers of their novels from the very beginning, but I am not one of those writers. I am not a visual writer at all. I am an auditory writer, the kind who cares a great deal about things like the rhythm of the dialogue and the mouth feel of names and titles. If you look up photos of celebrities to serve as models for your characters, you are a visual writer. If you rehearse your characters’ dialogue endlessly as you are walking about the house, you are an auditory writer. And if you are an auditory writer, you have probably not thought a whole lot about your novel’s cover art.

So I’m thinking about it now, because cover art is important. Good covers sell books, and this is something that deserves a great deal of thought. Even though I have 185 pages of revisions still to go…

It is a fairly timid cat and I didn't get a good look at it when I dropped by to pick up the keys. My expectation is I would not see it at all.

What actually happened is I unlocked the door and the cat came charging into the room, meowing its head off. Then it saw who I was and a long, uncomfortable pause ensued. In the end it decided to keep meowing at me.

I could not help but notice it stopped being interested in socializing with me the second the wet food hit the bowl....

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

Yeah, the inhospitably radioactive surface of the Earth is pretty much never actually inhospitably radioactive.

Also, announcer Fred Collins sounds a lot like Phil Hartman when he delivers the line

These are stories of the future; adventures in which you'll live in a million could-be years on a thousand may-be worlds.

I am aware of the order of events and I do know it would be more correct to say Hartman sometimes sounded like Collins.

Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are comment(s); comment here or there.

They still couldnt find the third root to canal again today, so I spent a lovely 2.5 hours being whupped on by the Bad Tooth Fairy and his able assistant. They did take the temp filling out and did the two roots they could find with permanent filling.

Everything tastes dentally, and the tooth doesnt like me at the moment.

It's been a day, y'all. Still not "better," though I think I can see it from here. Watched a person I admire and like quite a bit get attacked for sharing their point of view today, and it irked me.

Ended up so busy that I failed to get any writing done, and now I'm all brain fried.

FEH.

Anyway. I have silliness on Twitter, which is cheering me up. I had a couple awesome conversations with the David, which also made me happy. This weekend, I will get work done, and next week will be better.

*waves* See you then!

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