State of the Clairification Nation: –Not-a-Werewolf, now with new working title The Cossack’s Kin: ~20,000 words to completion –Dickensian Fantasy: in pieces on the floor (almost literally, but the sticky-notes were getting a lot of cat hair stuck to them, so I picked them up and put them in a stack instead) –Stories sold in 2009: 2 –Stories on submission: 1 –Stories undergoing revision: 1 –Stories nowhere near complete: 4 –Stories put on hold pending alchemical transformation into brilliant Nascent Novel: 2 …which means I have nothing at all ready to send out to people. *!* faster, faster, faster! […]
Novel Marathon, aka Using Up My Leftover Vac Days
Day 1 word count: ~3000 (all pure genius, of course… at least at the moment… they will probably be magically transformed into straw overnight) Number of hours at the keyboard: 11 Number of hours not at the keyboard: 2 (but the dishes are clean, damn it, even the ones the cats eat from) Cups of coffee: 3 Showers, baths or other hygienic activities: 0 Number of songs on playlist with “battle” or “war” in the title: 24 Number of times I had to look up the hierarchy of ranks in the Red Army (because I can never remember rank hierarchies even though I was in the army myself): 4 Number of ibuprofens: 1 (probably related to number of chin-ups on Tuesday: 0, actually, but not for lack of trying) Number of minor characters for whom I substituted the word “name” instead of naming them on the spot, due to forgetting list of Russian names when I left for the coffee shop: 5 Number of times protagonist lost consciousness: 0, although he did go to sleep during someone else’s POV scene (this metric is here to keep me on track, folks–I used to love to sneak out of scenes by knocking […]
Novel Deathmarch
Coming soon to Casa Clairification. Thursday, in fact. Today does not count as part of the Deathmarch because it was really more of a Household Stuff day. Also a Day of Roasted Vegetables. What am I doing roasting vegetables when I have a Novel Deathmarch in the works? …um. Good question. I’m going now. […]
In which it seems I am writing another novel
I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. (a) I always end up writing a new novel shortly before the current one is done, and (b) I think I have a Law of Conservation of Creativity, by which I mean that once I’ve made up something I like, I tend to want to spend more time with it. Regarding point (a), I see this as a psychological prophylactic against attachment to my work. So long as the new new novel is the Shiny Thing, the recently-completed novel can be kicked about and hacked apart and rejected without any personal suffering. Or maybe it’s the other way around–maybe I just get tired of a novel by the time I finish it, and my creative mind’s impatient to start on the next thing. The problem with the Not-a-Werewolf book is that I began it during the period of mental depletion that followed the end of the Dickensian Fantasy. I dicked around with that book for a full year before I really got down to business on it. I don’t know whether to count this toward its clock, or not. If I begin the clock with the current draft, it’s been just over a year […]
The awesomeness of other people
I read this story before the holidays and I keep thinking about it: “Beautiful White Bodies”, by Alice Sola Kim. Links: part 1, part 2. It’s political, it’s personal, and it doesn’t oversimplify. I enjoyed it a lot. […]