So…I went in last night to do some late work on the book after supper (which was late)\u00a0 and after typing away decided it was time to quit.\u00a0\u00a0 Whereupon Microsoft Word said (in my phrasing)\u00a0 “I feel sick and I’m quitting and what you’ve been working on may be lost when I shut down…Too bad, sucker.”<\/p>\n
Getting Word to come back into cooperation when it’s had one of its snit fits requires shutting down the whole system,\u00a0 being very firm that no, I do NOT want to save changes to the normal template, rebooting the system, and bringing back word, telling it again that no, even though it saved changes to the Normal template I do not want to use the changed version, and finally–finally!–getting back to the file I was in.\u00a0\u00a0 Some minutes of nail-biting and epithet muttering tension until I’m back in the file and can see what was or was not lost.<\/p>\n
Nothing was lost.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The file I’d been working on was first-draft, and the last scenes I’d been working on pretty strongly emotional, so re-doing them–even after less than an hour’s gap–would have been hard, especially when tired and with a headache.\u00a0\u00a0 (The headache is still here today and tonight, and may be related not only to Daylight Savings Time (blech!!) but to the succession of fronts we’re having.\u00a0 The sinuses are not happy.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I want to finish that chapter tonight if possible before the next front (due overnight) blows in.<\/p>\n
I spent part of the day re-reading the sections of Surrender None<\/em> that had to do with Gird’s interactions with gnomes but then got hooked into my own story and had to finish.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There are some errors in the omnibus (more than one spelling of someone’ s name (but I remember the rush on that, as the original attempt to scan the mass-market led to hilarious and pervasive errors…)\u00a0\u00a0 But there are also important good things…things I needed to re-read, in light of Arcolin’s interactions with gnomes and how they’re going to react to the resurgence of magery and also the chaos that results in Girdish lands from that resurgence.<\/p>\n However (having turned the page and read the prologue to Liar’s Oath)\u00a0 I was ready to smack my former self…no, that’s not right.\u00a0\u00a0 My excuse is that the entire book was written too soon after my mother’s death, and then hastily rewritten when then-publisher pointed out some major problems in the writing itself, and the prologue was a last-minute addition.\u00a0\u00a0 Grief screws up creativity:\u00a0 it uses up a lot of energy and will.\u00a0\u00a0 So you can just rip that page out of the book (or ignore it, would be better.\u00a0 Not sure that binding will survive a page being ripped out.)\u00a0 The ending still has some problems, but not as many with the prologue discounted.<\/p>\n On the business side, I received my author’s copies of the new release of The Speed of Dark<\/em> today, with its new cover.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have another piece of news about that book, which I can’t release until later (taping my mouth shut and forcibly pulling my fingers off the keyboard for a moment…)\u00a0 No, not a movie deal (I could wish!) but something else.<\/p>\n For those who attend conventions–I will be at A-Kon in Dallas in June and at WorldCon in San Antonio over Labor Day weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So…I went in last night to do some late work on the book after supper (which was late)\u00a0 and after typing away decided it was time to quit.\u00a0\u00a0 Whereupon Microsoft Word said (in my phrasing)\u00a0 “I feel sick and I’m quitting and what you’ve been working on may be lost when I shut down…Too bad, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29,4,86,53,5],"tags":[108,106,20,107],"class_list":["post-1793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-background","category-contents","category-conventions","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-background","tag-contents","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1793"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1794,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1793\/revisions\/1794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}