Jan 23

Progress, Lurching Ahead

Posted: under Life beyond writing, the writing life.
Tags: ,  January 23rd, 2017

That was actually me at the Austin Women’s March, the lurching ahead thing.  I had a cane with four little cushioned feet.  And needed it.  I am not as spry, had been sick earlier in the week (er…wasn’t OVER being sick, either!)  and instead of being in the 70s and partly cloudy, the sun came out full on just before the march started, and it shot up to about 90-something.  It was a great march; I didn’t make it the whole way, but I made some of it, enough to know I’d put out all the effort I had.

But INTO THE FIRE is now over 125,000 words.   Progress forward has slowed because I’m rearranging.  In my “process” (a word that suggests far more rationality in the choice of what to do and where to go next than I actually achieve!)  whenever I get stuck I start a different scene that’s been perking along but doesn’t necessarily belong right there, where I was when I started writing it.  It used to be that I wrote in chapters, all wandering around from maybe 4500 to 6000 words…short-story length, though they were clearly not stories in themselves.   Awhile back (not sure when) I started trying to form longer strings.  It’s not as smooth in some ways, but in others the lack of chapter markings along the way allows things to be the length they need.  What’s much harder is finding  things.   It’s much easier to remember that the chapter where the rhinoceros charges a beehive and ends up with sticky honey on his horn, and then rubs his horn in the gravel and it’s not ordinary gravel but jewels and now he’s got a jeweled horn…is chapter ‘low twenties’ if not the exact number, than to remember that it’s page 437 in a manuscript with no internal markers.

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Jan 20

UK Cover for COLD WELCOME

Posted: under artwork, Cold Welcome.
Tags: ,  January 20th, 2017

Today’s the day Orbit UK is releasing the cover art for COLD WELCOME so here it is.  If you want to see it in a larger format, it’s over at the Universes blog.

The Universes post has both this cover and the US cover in a larger format, plus my amateurish “concept” sketch in crayon, that looks nothing like either of them.  For a good reason.  I’m not a professional artist <G>.

 

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Jan 18

Notice of Change

Posted: under Life beyond writing.
Tags:  January 18th, 2017

My hosting service is closing down at the end of March.  I need to find a new hosting service, a new registrar, get everything backed up and transferred, ASAP.   As most of you know, getting that DNS change thing accomplished takes awhile (or can take awhile) and so there may be a gap in which the sites disappear.  If that happens, please be patient.  I can’t say when it might happen, yet, because I was only notified today of the shutdown.  I’m in freefall and trying to finish the book.  (Don’t know why I’m surprised–everything else in the past year and a bit that caused a new load of work to land on me did so in the context of “but there’s this deadline.” )   I will try to keep you informed, but I will be far busier than I thought I’d be.  I have four websites (and a sub off one of one of them, so five, really) and four blogs embedded in them.    That glug-glug-glug you hear may be me trying not to drown.  (Same message on Universes.)

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