Paksworld

This week wasn’t as productive as the week before, due to Things.    However, other than two of the Things (neither of which produced any balancing good result), Things got done that needed doing.  (Not all, by any means.)

10,020 words for the five-day work week despite one day of <300 words.   22,054 for the month of August up to this moment.   Need another 20,000 by the end of the month (before Dragon*Con, that is.)

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So…page proofs are done (check) and some family LifeStuff probably/maybe resolved (half-check) and I’m back “on book”.   Yesterday, after a dietary error that kept me close to one room in the house, turned out to be a very productive writing day anyway (3001 new words, in addition to cleaning up some continuity problems I discovered while working on the proofs of Kings…no, B- did not tell his father about hmmmmmph at Autumn Court, becuase hmmmmph didn’t start until AFTER Autumn Court. when ummmm went mmmmph.  Yes, hate me.)

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When my first published story came out,  I was startled at how differently it read, set in a two-column layout.  I’d been worried the story wouldn’t feel fast-paced enough–but in that format, it flew by, almost too fast-paced.   That was my first experience of how the choice of layout affects a story.

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There’s nothing like actually turning off everything else and convincing the distractable mind that no, it cannot do anything until it’s produced the day’s wordage.  No, we are not playing Solitaire.  No, we are not reading email.  No, we are not checking Twitter, or LJ, or the SFF.net newsgroup.   The television is off limits.   The new red shiny netbook is off limits.   The outdoors is off limits.   Cooking is off limits.  (Dishwashing isn’t.)    The piano is off limits.  This chair, this keyboard, this one file.  First.

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I spend a couple of hours with Book III yesterday (all I had, due to Other Things) and had fun with the inimitable Arvid.   I don’t know how much of this will fit in the final Book III–but it’s such fun to write.  As with the story of the King of Pargun and his difficult daughter Elis, that we put up  on the publisher’s blog site, I’ll find it a home somewhere even if it can’t stay in the book proper.

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….Almost.   Still a few more things to be done before shipping them back to NYC.   I need to rewrite the Dedication, write the Acknowledgments, and run back through the text to catch a couple of things I think I may have done wrong.   Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday was a partial success (interference from gut bug, but still some production of decent story) and today, despite Book III’s attempt to lure me off to another project (at least, I’m blaming III for that, rather than the other project–a nonfiction book), I made progress on both of them.   1500 on the nonfiction,  not quite 1500 on III.

Book III would like to run smoothly, but too smoothly…I stopped it in its tracks today when it was about to have a perfectly normal conversation in a place that demanded something else.   “Wait,” I said.  “If A really started from X in the morning,  A should have reached Y by now.  And A is only halfway between.  B started from Y at noon and is halfway now, so do we see a problem?”

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…But it’s fixed now and none of you will ever know why I had to dive back into Kings of the North, fix something, email my editor about it, have her point out what was wrong with the fix, fix it again….

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…and I am Not Ready.  Anxious, of course.   Eager, of course.  But if “ready” is supposed to include organized, all supplies in place, wardrobe chosen and prepared, etc, etc, etc….no.  Not Ready.   And thanks to the misery that’s Daylight Savings Time (every year I scream silently at the heavens “It does not save any !**! daylight!!!”  And here in Texas we pray all summer for night to come and give us small relief from the day’s heat and glare)  it is already 9:30 in the morning when it should be 8:30.

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Some of you may remember the posts I did last year during the Spring Revision Season, but some of you weren’t here yet, so I’ll chatter away as if you couldn’t look up the posts by category and find them (but go ahead if you want.)   Editor-revisions are basically the same as any other revision except that Editor has more experience and more clout even than DRW and Karen S- and Ellen M-.

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