Blog Without A Name

Trying to get this all in one place…

1.  September 30:  Start reading A Night in the Lonesome October.  Do you know where your hellhound is?

2. October 4:  Triumphant return from Temp Headquarters

3.  Sign 1500 sheets of paper; mail to Baen no later than October 18

4.  October 30:  Essay due at BenBella

5.  November 6:  VOTE

6. December 10:  Short story due at Baen

7.  February 15:  Carousel Sun due at Baen

8.   May 15:  Carousel Sea due at Baen

9.  July 15:  First of Five (oh, isn’t that fortuitous?) due at Baen

…and, yanno, Life and stuff.

Well.  That ought to keep me off the streets, if not precisely out of trouble…

I may have mentioned before that I’m trying to hit a firm 2,000 words/day on Carousel Sun while I’m here at Temp Headquarters.  The goal is to take home at least 60,000 darn near finished words on this project and the notes for the next.  That’s the goal.

So, anyhow, yesterday I saw that if I wrote a smidge more than 3,000 words, I would break 50K on the project, and have Half a Book!  So I pushed, a little, and I broke the Big 50, and this morning I read what I had written, over coffee and oatmeal.

And of course, it’s the wrong 3,000 words.

Mind you, it’s a good 3,000 words and it delivers information that Kate will need, later.  But not here.  So, the chapter goes into the File of Holding and the manuscript meter gets set back to 47,000 words total.

The plan for as soon as I finish my coffee and find a sweatshirt, is to go for a walk, figure out what Really Happens Next, and sit down and Actually Write That.

Elsewhere on Teh Intertubes yesterday, I had a conversation with a young writer who felt that writers who walk away from their work when “it gets hard” are whiners and not taking their craft seriously.  Her point was that if you walked away every time a piece of dialogue wasn’t working out, you’d never get anything done.  Which — OK; I can see that.

However, taking a break, even walking away for hours, days, weeks does have its place in the process of writing.  Perhaps some writers can sit down at nine in the morning and hit the keys for six or eight hours straight, and produce sparkling copy.  Most writers I know. . .don’t do it that way.  As someone else in yesterday’s conversation commented, writers do most of their writing away from the keyboard.

So, my coffee’s done, and my sweatshirt’s right over there on the hook.

See y’all later; I’ll be out for a while, writing.

Althea, Madeleine Robins (e)
Heartless, Gail Carriger (e)
Powers, James A. Burton (e)
A Geisha’s Journey, Komomo, photographs by Naoyuki Ogino
Geisha, Liza Dalby
The Kimono of the Geisha-Diva Ichimaru, Barry Till, Michiko Warkentyne, Judith Patt
Partials, Dan Wells
Starters, Lissa Price
A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs (read aloud w/Steve)
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin
From Whence You Came, Laura Anne Gilman (e)
Frederica, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
No Dominion, C.E. Murphy (e)
The Prestige, Christopher Priest
Cuttlefish, Dave Freer
Intruder, C.J. Cherryh (read aloud w/Steve)
Blameless, Gail Carriger (e)
Changeless, Gail Carriger (e)
The Quiet Gentleman, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Unbroken, Rachel Caine
The Talisman Ring, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Sylvester / OR, The Wicked Uncle, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Death and Resurrection, R. A. MacAvoy
The Unknown Ajax, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Black Sheep, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, Diane Duane (e)
The Reluctant Widow, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Friday’s Child, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Dragon Ship manuscript, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller (e)
Kim, Rudyard Kipling (e)
Regency Buck, Georgette Heyer (read aloud w/Steve)
Pollyanna, Eleanor H. Porter (e)
Chimera, Rob Thurman (e)

So, I’m still down here at Temp Headquarters.  One of my goals was to walk 5 miles a day — that comes down to those magic 10,000 steps fitness folk like to talk about.  I’ve made that much…some days.  Some days I’ve made more, some less — say, an average of 4 miles a day, since I’ve been living someplace with sidewalks and a downtown, and, yes, the Atlantic Ocean, all to hand.

I have noticed that, I do think better when I can walk; that walking helps me work out knotty problems in the work-in-progress in a way that just staring at the screen until the beads of blood form on my forehead just doesn’t.

I’ve also noticed that walking four or five miles a day. . .takes time.  At the pace I walk, about two hours.  Maybe two-and-a-half.  It’s not that I begrudge the time — after all, not only does it help me think, but walking’s good for me, physically — but it is time, there are a limited number of hours in the day, and adding in two hours of something means that two hours of something else needs to be eliminated.

Also, I worry, most sincerely, that I won’t be able to keep up my four mile/day habit, once I return to the Cat Farm,.  Log trucks, hunters, drivers texting while blaring down the road at 60+ mph, and similar perils of the natural world make walking perilous in the immediate vicinity, and getting in a car to drive someplace to walk seems like too much effort.

Well.

One of my other goals was to go home with most of a book and a good, solid idea for another in hand.  I’ve been writing 2,000 words/day, which is a pretty good rate. If I can keep it up through the end of my stay, I’ll have 3/5ths of Carousel Sun completed.  That’s nothing to sneeze at, certainly.

In the meantime, I miss Steve, and the cats,  at the same time I’m a little blue to realize that my working vacation will be over in only 12 more days.

…and that’s the news that’s fit to print, from Temp Headquarter.

Five at one blow

Regarding Signed Copies of Dragon Ship

There’s a new entry in the Archers Beach Blog, here.  And, some more pictures have been added to the Archers Beach Photo-Diary

First, the esteemed Mr. Stephen Gould is giving away five ARCs of his next Jumper novel, Impulse.  You already know you wanna read this book when it comes in January, but how cool would it be to able to read it in. . .October?  Go here to find out how you can enter to win one of those five ARCs.

Jennifer Jackson (aka Madame the Agent) is giving away the complete set of Liaden omnibi published by Baen in celebration of the fact that she helped facilitate the sale of FIVE Liaden novels to Baen!  That contest ends tomorrow, so go here now!

Uncle Hugo’s is now taking pre-orders for signed copies of Necessity’s Child.  Here’s your link.

Today, I took off and viewed lighthouses.  A short account of the day is here.

Also?  New pictures at the Archers Beach Photo-Diary!

1.  Lee and Miller sold five Liaden Universe® novels to Toni Weisskopf at Baen Books through the offices of Jennifer Jackson of the Maass Agency.  The question has been, which book will be the sequel to Dragon Ship.  The answer is:  They all are.

2.  Fifteen Liaden novels (aka all of them), divided into four Sequences are now available from Audible.com.  For those who may wish to sample the material, or the narrator, or both before purchase, Audible has generously provided a free hour sample of the first book in each of the four Sequences.  Handy links:  right here.

2a..  We hear from Mr. Feldberg at Audible that, yes, it is his intention to acquire the audio rights to Necessity’s Child.

3.  There’s a new splinter/story up at Splinter Universe.  Here’s the link.

4.  There was error at the bindery which resulted in some signed sheets being bound into the wrong edition (by which I mean wrong-ISBN, since the signed and unsigned editions bear two distinct ISBNs) of Dragon Ship.  This has, as you may well imagine, Caused Some Problems.  The quickest to recover is Don Blyly, who, now in receipt of Simon and Schuster’s fix (no, I don’t know whose fault it was, who’s fixing what, or exactly what the fix is — don’t, I beg of you, ask me to explain any this; I’m reporting, here.), is continuing to ship pre-ordered books.  He lets us know that he has another 100/150 unspoken for signed editions, so if Amazon has failed you — about which more in a moment — contact Uncle Hugo.

4a.  Amazon, evidentally neither as clever nor as accommodating as Uncle Hugo’s, is having head explosions all over the known book-selling universe.  It’s cancelling orders; sending unsigned books to people who ordered signed books; sending signed and unsigned books to people who only ordered signed books; sending signed books to people who didn’t order signed books.  None of that — not one detail of that — can we the authors fix for you.  We are very sorry for the mix-up.  But honestly?  It has sorta palled, even as black comedy.  Be it written that, by this point in the play, we are informed of the problem.

5.  Yes, we are also aware that the advertisement for Necessity’s Child that ran in Locus (and the art on the catalog pages at BN and Amazon) displays “Final Art to Come” on the cover.  No, we don’t believe that the final cover will display this message.   If it happens that we’re wrong about that, then we’ll have the opportunity henceforth to refer to that novel as Necessity’s Child: Final Art to Come.  Which has a nice, academic ring to it.

6.  It’s a cool and sunny day down here in the south.  I’ve finished my breakfast, the coffee’s gone and I need to go into Saco to take on supplies.

Here ends your Thursday morning Advert and Intelligencer.

Housekeeping note:  The wifi here at Temp Headquarters went out just as I was about to post the above at 9:15ish, so I have already accomplished #6, above.  On my way to Saco, I cruised by Camp Ellis, and Wormwood’s (which actually isn’t on the way to anything, but I digress).  I did see two cats, so apparently the gentleman from Away has not yet gotten his way.