Expiration Infinium

First, the great news:  Her Demonic Majesty is up on Amazon this very moment, so if you want a copy, go snag her here!  It took some fooling around, but she’s up and live.  If you buy it and like it, please leave a review.  If you buy it and don’t like, please leave a review and I can try to do better next time.

Now, on to the not-so-great . . .

I spend time on Facebook.  Some times I’m there to chat with friends, sometimes to play games, other times just to see what sort of insanity is passing for real life.  It can be a place of bad information, where if you posted as a fact that taping swiss cheese to your genitals for a week would release enzymes into your blood that would help you lose weight, someone would re-post it with a, “Yeah, this could work!” tag line.  It is also a realm of memes, both good and bad, some funny and others not so much.

I happened to check my home wall yesterday and came across a meme, one with a upset looking character in the picture, and the wording explaining everything:  ”I’m still pissed they canceled Firefly.”

Really?  After ten years you’re still pissed?  Please, give it rest and watch your DVDs one more time to relieve whatever angst is gnawing at you, though chances are good you’re still gonna be pissed in 2023.  Maybe you can get together with your friends and hold a “Still Pissed Twenty Years Later!” convention–you know, to remind all the other pissed off people you know that your darkest moment was the day Fox put the ax to your greatest show evar.

Fandom is a strange thing.  I will admit to being a fan of several things, and I will even admit to getting right down to the point where I could recite even the lamest point of trivia for my favorite forms of entertainment.  But when things went away, when they ended on a good or bad note, when things were left hanging because some suit looking over a spread sheet said, “This show is eating up too much revenue can it and put on wrestling in it’s place,” I’ve also sort of went, “Okay, what’s next?” and moved on.

Ah, but there are some people who just can’t let go, who are gonna be upset when something they love ends.  Just last week we heard about how Charlaine Harris, she of the The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels that became True Blood, was receiving death threats from fans upset she is taking their Sookie away.  I remember the forums soon after Farscape was canceled, and Bonnie Hammer got C-worded about a thousand times.  And I’ve suffered through years of the sordid tales of raped childhoods because The Phantom Menace was release–or, worse yet, because Gredo shot first.

As some omnipotent alien once said, “All good things must come to an end,” and these days if it’s a television series, or a movie, the only way that’s gonna happen is if there’s money to be made by doing so.  That’s what happened with Star Trek:  the demographics were underestimated, the the first movie was made, didn’t do what was expected, and someone went, “I got an idea–”, the second move came out, and the rest is history.

That didn’t happen with Serenity.  There was a very loud and boisterous fan base that snapped up DVDs, and the studio thought, “Hey, they want a movie, maybe we can make something off this.”  And the movie was made, and that’s when it was discovered that while the fan base was loud and boisterous, they weren’t as large as was hoped, and that was the reason there wasn’t another movie, and there hasn’t been another series–and likely will never be.

Sometimes you have to let these things go, because they were good in their moment, but when you want to see them again, as they were, a decade later, you’re going to have something that will never live up to the expectations of the fans.  Say Joss doesn’t want to make another billion dollars with super hero movies, and decides to ruin Nathan Fillion’s and Morena Baccarin’s careers (as he said he’d have to do when he was on Reddit).  So everyone comes back ten years later–oh, wait.  Two characters don’t, ’cause they’re dead, and if you know where Joss was going with the story, Morena Baccarin doesn’t have to worry about long term contracts, ’cause she’s going belly up soon.  Simon and Kaylee are probably knockin’ out kids, and do you want those rugrats on a ship, ’cause we all know how well precocious kids and space ships get along.

No, you’re not going to have a continuation of what left the air ten years ago–you’re gonna have a reboot.  Let the childhood raping begin.

It’s never a happy moment when something you love goes away.  But nothing last forever–and if it does, thy name be The Simpsons, which is still on television because it’s a money maker for Fox.  Everything else goes the way of dusty death, and I’ve even planed out the end of some of my stories–

Though it would help if I could get them started first.

Plugging In and On

Saturday was a long day for a number of reasons, which was mostly due to me getting up at five-thirty and not heading off to bed until almost eleven.  Lots of running around, lots of drama, lots of things happening.  It was the sort of day that seems to go on and on, and it just sort of ends with one falling asleep in their chair–which is exactly what I did.

Through all that I had one goal to complete:  getting the Table of Contents created for Her Demonic Majesty.  I created a copy of the novel as a Word document for the Smashwords upload, and started getting all the bookmarks set up, ran thought it looking for errors (of which I found three), and then began linking the chapter headings to the bookmarks.

In all, a solid two hours of work, getting the document ready.  But it’s ready.  Finally.

It remains for me to do the Kindle version today, but that won’t take as long because I don’t need to do a review of the manuscript, just create bookmarks on the chapter headings, and set up the links to the bookmarks.  I may do that after I upload the first document into the Smashwords meat grinder–that checker of all epublishing checkers–and wait to see if any errors return.  I don’t believe it’s going to kick me, but you never know.

This is where I stand this morning:  all ready to go, covers and everything.

I’m nervous as hell.

I remember when I uploaded Kuntilanak to Smashwords, and after reading all the warnings about how long the programs may take to check the manuscript and the possibility of errors forcing me to make additional edits to the story before it could become a real ebook, everything turned a bit anticlimactic when the story uploaded in two minutes.  The day and a half I’d spent getting everything in order paid off, and the week or so I’ve spent with Her Demonic Majesty will, I’m certain, pay off in the long run, also.

Still doesn’t keep me from getting all shook up and nervous.

Oh, and I need to get an ISBN number, which is something the Smashwords upload allows.  You just tell them you need a number, and there it is.  At least I think that’s the case:  I need to check . . . yeah, just ask for a Free ISBN and you’ll get it.  I should look into getting a copyright on the novel as well, because it’s really, really mine then.

So much to do, but not really.  It’s the final crossing of the lines to make sure the novel is truly finished.  Then, once it’s up, I can sit back and watch the money roll in.

Ah, yeah.  If only that last part were true.

If nothing else, I’ll have this novel published this year.  There is more I want put up as well, but this is the start.  And it only took two months to go from the point of “I’m starting to work on this,” to ” It’s up and ready for you to buy!”

Once this is out of the way, I guess I can get back to writing.

Idealand

Inspiration can come from the strangest places, and ideas generally follow.  This weekend I had time for a lot of both, since I’m not doing a lot of writing, and this free time has my brain in “creativity mode” for the most part, so strange things come of these things.

I spent a lot of time designing a house.  Not just any house . . . this was something I did for my Annie, my friend and–well, it’s complicated, as they way on The Book of Faces.  (That could be a title for an episode of Game of Thrones, where The Imp looks about for the leather-bound document that is a list of all the whores he’s bedded . . .)  We talked about things past, and I mentioned that I could using one of my new programs to create an image of a place that is one of her favorites.  Since I was going to do this anyway, I didn’t wait for her to say “Yes”, and just started in on my work.

As with anything creative, it took time.  But by yesterday afternoon I was finished, and she was happy with the outcome.  It was then we started discussing our own characters, and how they would fit into a story, and how . . . well, we’ve had this conversation before, and the problem always comes down to taking characters that were created for one world, and putting them in another.  How is this done, and more importantly:  how do you keep them interesting.

Answer:  nothing is easy.  Trust me, I’ve done this.  It’s not easy.

Of course, Annie is tenacious.  She pushes, she rocks, she roles.  She knows if she can get me to thinkin’ enough, I’ll come up with something.  And it was while this “Something” was going on that I hit a Eureka! moment.  So I told her, “I gotta go grill, but I’ll be thinking,” and with that I was off to the back yard to start cookin’ and get thinking.

See, something crept into my head when we were talking–something that I’d thought of a few weeks back when I was working on an old story idea.  I’d imagined some organization that is sort of one part Illuminati and three parts Crazy Secrets of the World investigators.  And what if . . . what if they know about things that only one in half a billion people can do, and when they find one of these people they do what they can to get them trained before . . .

Never mind the before.  I had a kernel of world building growing, and I didn’t want it to go stale.

Needless to say, when I told Annie what I had, she was happy, but she also had questions; apparently she didn’t realize that building a new world doesn’t happen while you’re trying to keep your Italian sausage from burning.  But I have something here.  I have an outline in my head.  And I even . . .

I have a map starting.

Oh, yeah.  It’s that sort of days.

It would be a lot better day if work wasn’t making me do things–

Transformatting Station

As Replacements is no longer the work in progress, it became time to, shall we say, find a replacement.  What is a girl to do, then, when she needs a project?

She goes demonic.  And with majesty.

After weeks of getting Replacements ready, it was time to bring out the big story:  Her Demonic Majesty.  With a cover on the way, and Harper Voyager out of the way, I’m free to publish Demonic Majesty as I see fit.  As such, last night began the almost final leg of this novel, nearly two years in the making.

The editing is out of the way, but getting into Chapter One again, and what do I find?  A couple of typos.  Which pissed me off because I wonder:  did HV see those few errors and think, “What a tool.  The reject pile for her!”  One can never tell, because Harper Voyager will keep their secrets, and they gave me no pointers when they told me, “Next time, Chickiepoo.”

But the editing is minimal; it’s the formatting that’s important.  What does one do to get a story ready?  Let me tell ya–

First I bring up the “Show Hidden Marks” in the document.  When you’re formatting for an ebook, you need to make certain there isn’t a space at the start of a paragraph.  This does strange things to your document once it becomes an ebook, and you only want strange in your stories.

I don’t have to worry about en and em hyphens, because I have Scrivener take care of that while writing.  En hyphens are found when you’re writing something like “New York-to-London-to-Paris,” and em hyphens are used when you’re separating clauses–like that.  Since I learn how to use character codes to put them in place in my story, I never worry about this part, I only double check to make sure something didn’t get messed up while writing.

I then check for three words that I don’t want to use.  First is the word, “So” at the beginning of dialog.  It’s never a good thing to have your characters saying, “So, you’re going to . . .” because it sounds a little awkward.  Then I check for “Suddenly”, and in, “Suddenly, the word appeared in a sentence!”  Whatever is appearing is appearing right that minute, so unless it’s creeping into view–which you’ll point out in your writing–don’t tell your readers it’s there suddenly.  Lastly, I look for “Very”, because very is a bad word.  Very is soft; very is weak, very–as was pointed out in Dead Poets Society–will not get you laid.  So be done with it, and use a word that is far, far better.

After that I need to set up my Table of Contents, but since Scrivener allows you to create .mobi fills for ereaders, I’m going to play with that and see if it builds one for me.  It’s not hard to do, just time consuming.  When that’s done, you set your title, set your last page, and then . . .

Then you upload and put it, as Freddie would say, in the lap of the gods.

If all goes well, I’ll have Her Demonic Majesty published by the end of May.  Maybe before, because with Memorial Day weekend then, too many people will be out and won’t be around to buy the book.  I wouldn’t want to deprive them of the joy of purchasing my first novel.

It’s coming.  No more tall.

It’s really happening, and soon.

Ninety Days Hath September

It’s time, more or less.  If my calculations are correct, ninety-six days have passed since I submitted my novel, Her Demonic Majesty, to The Great Harper Voyager Cattlecall.  Every day I have scanned my inbox looking for an email from Harper Voyager, sending me congratulations that out of all the submissions fired off in the first twelve days of October, mine was worthy of publication.

Alas, no such thing happen.  It is safe to say that my novel has not been among the lucky to make the cut—

That doesn’t make it, or me, a failure.

Allow me to explain.

Writing seems to be a lot of “doing”.  If you want to make a story, you have to do the writing.  If you want to finish the story, you have to keep doing the writing, day after day.  If you want to get it published, you have to do the editing, and do the submission package.  If you want to self publish, you gotta do the cover, and you gotta do the special editing that ebooks need, and you gotta do the upload and get it out on all the different ebook sellers.

It’s a lot of doing.

This is something that people who have already played this game, the writing game, know.  They’ve been here, they’d happily danced in the moonlight, and they’ve shuffled their feet through fallen leaves of disappointment.  They understand this game, they know the insides and outs . . .

If there is one thing they know, it’s that you are not a failure if you are trying to make your goals become real.  If you are hard honing your skills, developing your craft, then you are not the failure people will make you out as—and trust me, they will.

I’ve one rejection; I’ve may have another (what is this?  Read on . . .).  Both are for the same novel.  Does this make me a failure?

Are you kidding?

See, I’ve done my work.  I’ve went from A to Z, and filled in all the points between.  I’m put my package together, and I’ve sent it off with my fingers crossed.  I’ve done of the “dos”, and someone looked at it and gave it thumbs down—

But they looked at it.

The harsh truth is, there are a lot of people sitting on various Facebook groups going on about finding people to sprint with so they can get their five hundred or seven hundred, or even a thousand words in for the night, and then they’re off doing whatever the hell else it is they’re doing.  And a year later they’ll sitting around bitching about how no one realizes what a great writer they are, and if they could find someone to sprint with, they could finish this novel they’ve been working on for the last year . . .

That’s failure.  That’s someone waiting for opportunity to not only knock, but to escort them to the limo and drive them to the salon for a mani-pedi and hair styling before taking them shopping for the dress they’re going to wear to their book signing.

It’s all fantasy fulfillment, thinking that if the right person sees their novel, they’re going to be The Next Big Thing.

About a week ago I posted a quote by Dwayne Johnson.  Say what you will about him, but the guy pretty made himself after coming very close to hitting bottom.  There was another quote I saw attributed to him, one that I will say many people I know should take to heart.  It’s simple in its pronouncement:

 

Hey, stop saying, “I Wish”, and start saying, “I Will”.

 

Wishing works in many an interest story:  I know, I’ve written a few.  But in real life there are no jinn who are going to make your life easy.  There are no magic coins to give you what you want.  You wanna publish, you need to stop wishing and start willing.

There is a quick update here, however.  Apparently Harper Voyager had so many things sent in that they discovered it was going to be impossible for them to get notifications to everyone by 15 January.  In fact, they’re saying they’ll actually send out rejections, instead of not saying anything, which is what they’d said a while back.

This means there is still hope.  This means it’s still possible Her Demonic Majesty may be picked up.  It’s a real possibility.

The only thing I know for sure . . . I ain’t a failure.

I leave that for the wishers.

 

 

Ghost of the Writing Past

Today has been one of those that work well with my adage that writing is work, and if you want to get things right, you gotta do your leg work.  Or, as Chuck Wendig says in his piece on NaNoWriMo, October should be named “National Story Planning Month.”  Sit down and begin getting your shit together about what you’re going to dump upon the page for all of November.

Assuming you want to do it right, that is.

My NaNo 2012 novel is a follow up to my story Kuntilanak.  As that was a horror story that took place in Indonesia–specifically, the island of Bali–my new novel is a horror story that also takes place in Indonesia, this time in the city of Makassar, on the island of Sulawesi.  I’m moving around the archipelago a bit, sampling the local flavor, and I’d decided a while back that if I was going to do another story with my Fearless Indonesian Ghost Hunters, I would stage it in an urban setting.

Fortunately for me, I have a few connections with people from Indonesia.  Which means, for about three hours today, I sat in a Panera’s and talked about the city of Makassar with someone from there.  Picked up some information on conditions, locals, greetings, names . . . and learn a few about ghosts and weapons.  Yeah, weapons: because sometimes you just gotta rip up something magical with something sharp.

The last couple of days have seen a lot of work on the next novel.  While thinking about ghosts, I’m feeling the ghost of something I had a year ago . . . something that feels like what I had going a year ago.  I’m excited; I’m pumped.  I’m ready to jump into this work, and maybe I’ll make Indonesian ghosts famous at last.

I finished the time line yesterday about 6 PM.  I looked at it for a while, and in looking at it, I came up with ideas about the story, and even managed to dream up a detail that comes up as a major point.  At the same time, I figured out the motivation behind what’s happening . . . yeah, I’m like that.  Get the basic idea, beat it for hours on end, and eventually, you work it out.  One way or another.

So, what has come along?  Well, for one, the timeline has turned into this:

Yes, that’s twenty-four chapters and a Coda.  When you add the prologue into the mix, I’m looking at a total of twenty-six chapters.  If I do two thousand words a chapter, that’s fifty-two thousand words.  I expect I’ll write more than two thousand a chapter:  in fact, I’ve already set the Project Total in Scrivener to sixty thousand words.

And since I’m starting to move everything on the above timeline to Scrivener, here’s what that looks like:

That’s Part One of my timeline set up on Scrivener chapter cards.  This is how I work; this is how I write.  It might seem like a lot of work, but for me, it makes me comfortable.  It gives me the direction I need so I can perform “Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!”  Because with where I’m going with this story, if I simply jumped in and started slinging crap about the word processor, I’d end up with a manuscript that looks like hammered shit.

Not for this writer.

Anyway, that’s what I’m doing, and where I’m headed.  It feels like old times again.

It feels like writing.

Closer to the Edge

Okay, there is no need to panic come midnight on Halloween.  Because I have a location, I have something of a plot, and I even have a title.

Yes, my NaNo Novel, 2012 version, is finally taking shape.

This is what comes when you have strange forms floating about in your mind.  This is what also comes when you’re half asleep throughout most of the day, and you need something to kick the get-through-the-day level up just a notch.

I’ve had an idea for this story for some time, but in the last week, everything changed.  (Well, it is the 21^st Century, right?)  I realized that for a second novel–and a followup story to Kuntilanak–I was reaching too far.  For what I had in mind, it was too big of a story.  Got that?  I was going for something too big, and big wasn’t what I needed.

I needed something a little like the first story, but not so small that it felt like a retread of the first story.  I wanted to set it in an urban environment, but the city where I’d imagined the story was too big.  I needed something a bit smaller, and if possible, a bit remote.

Then I found what I was looking for, and a couple of Google searches later, the threads began winding together.

This is the way I put the last one together.  It’s strange that when I know I’m on the right path, everything just seems to work for me.  I know people, I know, or seem to know, the local, and I know how things should go.  And I have the title, which is what I need before I start a project, because I’m nuts like that.

But the thing that’s tripping all my circuits, is that I’m excited.

Sitting down and giving Her Demonic Majesty a good edit, prior to sending it off to Harper Voyager, seems to have gotten the juices going again.  I started in on my Halloween story last night, but in trying to get an idea of the local I was in, I probably spent too much time looking around Google Maps, and not enough time writing.  I did about three hundred and sixty words, and maybe a total of seven hundred over the last couple of days, but that’s something I won’t have to type tonight and tomorrow.  It’s out of the way, and if the chapter runs over fourteen hundred words–well, I’m already half-way there.

The new novel is giving me a good vibe.  I feel like I’ll be able to get into it fairly quickly–I even have the prologue in my head, ready for 12:01 AM, 1 November, to click over and arrive, so it can get into its chapter card.

I’ve had this feeling before, but not for a while, at least not through the summer.  This last summer was a grind, and it tested me as a writer.  If I could get through it, feelings as I did, facing the stuff I’ve faced, then I can keep going.  I can keep writing.

I’m closer to the edge . . . of the insanity we know as NaNoWriMo.

I’m ready.  Lets bring it on.

Upon the Path Well Trod

Yesterday was a sort of relaxation day for me.  It was the start of research for NaNoWriMo–for my yet untitled story, which I’m dreaming up–but I was taking it easy.  I believe I have the local for the story worked out, and I’m getting ideas together.  So it shouldn’t be long before people see my NaNo author’s page began to take shape.

But, as with everything else, I’ve always got the mind thinking.  One of the things that’s been on my mind of late is my character Jeannette, from Her Demonic Majesty, and her arc.  Like I’ve said before, I’d like to continue her story, and when I start thinking that way, I get into a lot of detail.

Now, I’ve not went as crazy as I did with Albert and Cytheria, where I know what they’ll do with their lives for about two hundred years, but I can figure out, with some sketchy detail, what’s going to happen to her over twelve years.  So if and when I get to the point where I want to start in on her story again, I have some idea where she’s going.

(And, please:  don’t tell me she knows where she’s going.  She’s my character, a figment of my imagination, so if Jeannette decides she wants to open a nail salon in the Loop, it’s only because I have completely lost my mind, and I’m scribbling my manuscript on toilet paper with an eye liner pencil.)

Over the weekend, however–well, even before that–I started in on another story for her, another path that I’ve walked a few times before.  I was thinking about Kerry, my old role playing character, and how he could find himself integrated into the story.  But wait:  just sit back and see where I go with this . . .

I came up with an idea where, towards the end of September, he shows up on Jeannette’s doorstep.  Now, I may have said this before, by Jeannette knows about him–I won’t say how, but she does.  The kid on her step, though:  it’s not the Kerry she remembers.  This is a different kid, who seems a little broken–well, a lot broken–because he’s not with someone . . .

Annie.

Yeah, Jeannette knows something isn’t way right.  If he’s by himself, it means that someone has meddled in the affairs of this universe, and she has to know what has gone wrong.  Because . . . well, just because.  Jeannette’s like that.  Sure, she might play a crazy, cold-hearted psycho bitch, but that’s only on TV.  In her real life, she wants to set things write.

I thought this part of pretty well.  I set things up, and have an idea of how the story would go, so all that would remain is–you got it–writing the sucker.  We’re talking another novel here, but it’s probably a short one, maybe sixty thousand words.  Maybe.

It’s a path I’ve walked before, and it’s a project that I spoke about before, then abandoned because–hell, there were a number of reasons at the time.  There still are a few, but were I to start it now, I do believe I have a better handle on the matter.  Mostly because I know the focus of the story.  I know where attention needs to be paid.

Once you’ve walked a path long enough, you know ever bump, and that keeps you from making missteps.

Now, to find a good pair of hiking shoes . . .

Quick Time on the Slow

Today is the day I start getting serious.  Today it the day I get my package together for Harper Voyager.  It’ll be a little scary, but not daunting.

If anything, it’s going to be interesting, because it’s going to be a bit like a race at Darlington.

Allow me to explain:

Darlington Raceway is a 1.7 mile track in South Carolina.  At one time it was meant to be a smaller version of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but because someone refused to sell land upon which a minnow pond sat, the track ended up looking a big egg.  The original raceway was flat, though there was embankments along the turns which were meant to prevent drivers from crashing if they entered a turn too fast.  It wasn’t long before someone figures out that if they drove on the embankments, they could go faster than the people on the flat turns, and it wasn’t long before the embankments became the turns.

Darlington has a reputation for tearing up cars.  The surface is rough, and eats away tires quickly.  The turns are very narrow, and they don’t allow for mistakes.  Cars tend to slide a great deal in the turns, which is a lot of fun when you’re going 140 mph.  And the moment you lose concentration, you’re up in the wall.

The was one driver who used to have a great deal of success at Darlington.  His advice, which he passed along to other drivers, was this:  ”In order to go fast here, you have to slow down.”  His logic was this:  most drivers will find the quickest speed through a turn, then hammer the accelerator on the straits, then brake and find the quickest speed through the next turn.  And so on.  This is hard on a car:  it wears down the brakes, because you have to drop thirty to forty mile per hour going into the turns, then get that back on the straights.

But there was another way.  Slow down, find a comfortable speed for both the straights and the turns, use the slower speed to hug the bottom of the turn–which is the quickest way around–and keep doing that.  Less wear and tear on the car and driver, because did I mention this was a five hundred mile race?  And that an average lap was about forty seconds?  Do the math:  you’re in a hot car, on a track named, “The Lady in Black,” and you can only win if you’re in one piece at the end.

So day is a matter of finding the rhythm to get through what I need to do.  Story over seventy thousand words?  Check.  Favorite scene?  Got that, check.  Short synopsis?  Sorta got one, so check.  Published before?  Check.  Query letter?  Have part of one, just need to look over a few sites for more tips, and polish it up.  Check.

Convert novel to Word or RTF format?  Easy to do in Scrivener.  Check.

Novel ready to go?  You know it.

I won’t rush today.  I’ll take my time, look everything over, and get it all together today.  I might not hit that submit button until late in the afternoon, or even the evening, but I will click that sucker.

Find the right speed, and hang on.

A lot of times, that’s all you need to get to the checker flag in one piece.

Coda on the Coda

We have come to the point where there is nothing left but to wrap up my package, and send it off with best wishes.

About 9:15 PM last night, I made the last change to Her Demonic Majesty.  I saved the manuscript, then copied it off to my external hard drive where I keep a whole lot of things.  I was finished, done, complete.  The novel is in about as good a form as it’s ever going to get, and now comes the fun part.

Tonight I’ll get into the Harper Voyager site and look at their submission requirements, then begin the process of putting my package together.  I could even do that today at lunch, just to get an idea about what to collect after I have dinner.

But I think, tonight, the package will be together.  Maybe it’ll even go out tonight.  One will need to watch my author’s page on Facebook to see that.  Or just wait until tomorrow here, and I’ll talk about how it feels to click a button, knowing your hopes and dreams are riding on that one on-click event.  (That’s programmer talk, in case you were wondering.)

I mentioned to someone last night that this edit really showed me the importance of doing a few pass-throughs on a story.  I’d found things wrong the first couple of times through, but this time I really read the story; saw the words and listened to the story.  I actually read it this time, and saw where things didn’t make sense, or sounded clumsy.  I caught very few spelling mistakes; maybe a couple of dozen in all.  I found one instance where I found a comma instead of a period.  I also discovered maybe eight instances where I’d used the same word twice in a row.

Now it’s all behind me . . . there is nothing but hope ahead.

As we get deeper into the Witching Month, I’ll have more time to work on my four-part Halloween story (approved by witches, like the one to the right, everywhere), and finally get around to setting up my NaNo Novel.  I thought on it a little yesterday, and I realized I need to change locals.  Not that it’s a problem; in fact, I think it’ll fit in well if I write the story so that it’s open enough that I could do another with the same characters later.

Get through November, and then . . . then is the good question.

Do I go back to editing, and get a few more stories ready to go out?  Or do I start on something new, something that I can get out there quickly.  I’m already considering taking one of my works and going the self-publishing route once more, just to see if I can generate some interest.

Ah, so many decisions.  So many things I could do, but which is the right one?

As one of my characters is fond of saying, “A vision of the future is nothing more than that:  a vision.  It may happen, it may not.  What you must realize, though, is you have no way of knowing if your actions will take you towards that vision, or move you away.  You can never know the journey; you can only see a possible destination.”

I see the destinations.  I only need to make the journey.

Re-imaging the Vision

There was a point last night, during the editing of Chapter Sixteen of Her Demonic Majesty, that I found it necessary to slap the side of my head.  I was probably half way through the chapters, and the editing was turning into a bit of a rewrite.  Not that I was changing the tone of the chapter any, but I was cutting here and adding there . . . at one point I was forty words down from where the word count had started, and by the time I slapped myself I was just a hair over one hundred words over where the chapter started–

I sort of mumbled, “I can’t believe I sent this off for publication.”  Because if there’s one thing I’ve discovered during this edit, it’s that I should have never sent Her Demonic Majesty for publication back in June of this year.

It’s not that it’s bad, but there are so many little things that needed correction, and more than a few areas where it needed elaboration.  With Chapter Sixteen, it was really a case of changing around how some things were said, getting rid of a few things that were unnecessary–I sometimes used two or three words to say something, where one was sufficient–and made things a little clearer.  I think there was only one part in one chapter–Chapter Fifteen–where I realized something was likely happening in a room, and I never indicated what, if anything, was done to fix that issue.

So seven chapters remain.  My original plan was to finish up by Saturday evening, put my submission package together Sunday, and fire everything off to Harper Voyager on Monday morning, 1 October.  That will not happen.  I’ve got a new story to start this weekend, and at best I might edit four chapters.

So . . . I will get Her Demonic Majesty off to Harper Voyager before the deadline closest, but I’m not going to be the first out of the gate.  Because to rush at this point would be to half-ass the edit.  And half-assing at this point is little more than admission that I, the writer, does not give a single shit about getting published.

That is about as far from the truth as one could get.

I am under no illusions that I am sending off something perfect.  But, this copy is going to be damn good.  It’s already damn good; I’m in the process of making it better.

Some might say, “Why are you putting all this upon your shoulders?  Get someone to help you.”  The time will come when I will get help, but right now I am sharpening my skills.  I am learning an art form that I didn’t know when I started on this path–and that is the art of editing.  And while editing Majesty, I’m seeing what it takes to sharpen a story.

I am making it sharper.  So when it hits the desk at Harper Voyage, this time it’s going to make someone take notice.

Or such is my hope.

If there is one think I take away from writing, it’s that I don’t know everything.  I am learning each day, and the more I learn, the better I become.  I know now it’s only a matter of time before this is recognized.  All that was really necessary was for me to do the work.

And understand that not all visions are right the first time you see them.

Waking Up in a Snowbound Valley

The last few nights have been, shall we say, pretty mediocre.  I’ve been getting my sleep, but the thing I’m really missing out on are my dreams.  When I was back home–the Real Home, that is–I was sleeping in and getting some rest.  Now that I’m back at The Undisclosed Location, the sleep is back to being languid, and while I’m getting rest, I’ve had better.

I’m missing my dreams, though.

I’ve been keeping up with my editing, though.  Knocked off another six thousand or so words just last night, and a little over four thousand the night before . . . I’ve probably edited close to thirty-five thousand since just Thursday or Friday, and I’ve probably another twenty thousand or so to go.  I’m being realistic in thinking I won’t make my 1 October date for submission to Harper Voyager, but it will go out next week.

This is all good, but something happened this morning that’s never happened before.  Let me set it up:

I was in bed; I think I’d woke up the first time about 4:30 AM.  I was dozing back and forth between being half asleep and half awake.  I let the alarm go off, then laid there for a while, because I don’t like to get out of the bed right away.

It was during this time that I started to doze again, and when I feel that coming on I’ll do something to remind myself that I shouldn’t fall asleep, or I’ll be late for work.  And I wouldn’t want that, would I?

So about the time I was suppose to be hauling myself out of bed, I found myself in a state that was . . . well, it was one of those strange moments when I could have been awake, but I didn’t feel like it.  As my eyes opened, I caught myself saying, “Don’t worry, Emma.  We’re gonna get home.  I promise.”

That wasn’t me speaking; that was one of my characters, talking to another character.

It was strange that I did that, however.  Yes, I was thinking of a scene with those two characters the night before, and they were on my mind before I dozed off to sleep.  But I didn’t dream of them; I don’t remember what I dreamed about.

But when I said those words, I knew where I was:  I was in a tent, in Quebec, up near the James Bay Project, and there was a blizzard raging around us.  I had to get up, break camp, and head for home by . . . lets just say we had to fly.  There was little food, and the feeling that our chances of making it home were low.

But I was feeling up.  I knew we’d make it–or, at the least, I was trying to appear that way, because I knew it was going to be a long day.

This is going to be a long day; I know it.  I felt it last night, and I’m feeling it today.  Things to do, people to meet, and writing to be had.  If I’m lucky, I’ll get into bed about midnight.

Then do it all again tomorrow.

Sometimes, I think I’d rather be flying through a blizzard with a good friend at my side.

As least I’d know that if I go down, if I don’t make it, I’m not going alone . . .