Being carefully correctly wrong

Today I can has lots of things. They include, in no particular order:

• My contributor's copy of Not One Of Us #39! I'm sharing a ToC with sovay, erzebet, madwriter, and lots of other fabulous people. My story, "Ghostlight", is a prequel to "Smoke & Mirrors", and explains how Odin found his ghost-girl sidekick. I don't see this issue on The Genre Mall yet, but I expect it will be available soon.


• Editorial notes from arcaedia. In a perfect world, I could finish these revisions by the end of the month, without flinging myself down the stairs in despair. Updates on the stair-flinging to follow.


• My office back. Because I r serious riter now, and can has home-office deduction. I'll try to resist the sofa's siren song. But once I figure out what the heck is wrong with my monitor adapter, I'll get my nice dual-monitor set up back, with speakers loud enough to gothercise to. (And loud enough to drown out the calls of the damn telemarketers.)


• Elysium's steampunk ball on Saturday, a Ministry show on Tuesday, Dimmu Borgir the Monday after that (I'm going for the hilarity, really), and She Wants Revenge in May. And then the Cure in June. None of these, sadly, really make up for my lack of Evil Sexy Leonard Cohen tickets. :(

And in case any of the new people haven't heard about Shadow Unit, new episode Sunday night/Monday morning! They let me write for this one! (Don't worry, I was supervised, and they put me back in the ghoul-kennel after.)

Progress report, and prologue

Virtupitude is mine! I started revising TDC today, and crossed off two items from arcaedia's notes. (There were 12 specific scene-level type things, and some overall story concerns that boil down to something like "more roller derby sooner".) I also killed some survivors of the Great Comma Pogrom and an instance of word-rep that snuck through at least 3 drafts. :P

And since jaylake and maryrobinette and others have been discussing first novels, I'll throw in my two cents. (For the new people who haven't suffered through this all before.)

Novel 0: The Dread Juvenilia. I started this in high school. It was a completely hideous crossover fantasy starring thinly disguised stand-ins for me and my best friends. If I could rip off Andre Norton, Jennifer Roberson, or Mercedes Lackey for any given scene, by god I did. This evolved over the years, eventually ditching the crossover elements in favor of Generic European Fantasy. I started ripping off George Martin along the way, too. By 2002 I'd joined the OWW and had 100k of nearly coherent (yet bad) book. I was maybe three scenes away from finishing it. (Not the story, of course, only the first book of it.) I stopped there and went back to start revising, and the whole thing crumbled under the weight of suck, so I never actually finished a draft. (I'm not sure if I started this my junior or senior year of HS, but I worked on it for at least 7 years.)

Novel 1: Dreams of Shreds and Tatters. Sick unto death of TDJ, I decided to write something completely different. (I had my BA in English by then, and was taking grad classes--this did not equate to quality of prose in any way.) So I started a Lovecraftian urban fantasy based on...yes, a CoC game I was in. Between 2003 and 2005 I screamed, wailed, gnashed my teeth and tore my hair, and finished a draft*. I revised it. I revised it again. I submitted it to agents.

No one wanted it. Possibly this has to do with the prose and scene-structure sucking the chrome off a trailer hitch. So I trunked it and went looking for the next project**. I still love the story, though, and one day I'll white-paper the damn thing and find a draft that sucks less.

Novel 2: The Drowning City. I wanted something with spies and jungles and monsoons. Several characters from the last incarnation of TDJ lobbied for a new lease on life. It wasn't their fault, they insisted, that I couldn't write my way out of a wet paper bag before. So I cut them out of the GEF setting and adolescent angst and gave them a new world to play in. They gave me a book that didn't suck. I finished a draft. I revised it. I submitted it to agents. arcaedia liked it. There was much rejoicing.

So, yeah, no first-novel brilliance here. I think the moral is, if you've worked on a novel for seven years (and you aren't George Martin), for the love of god stop! Go do something else for a while.

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* I also started writing short fiction in those three years. Short stories improved my sentence-level writing like nothing else in the world.

**Between Dreams and TDC, I also started three other novels: Prayers to Broken Stone (20k), The Bone Palace (15k), and Pinion (20k). I'm a little flighty when it comes to picking the next project. :P