Archive for the ‘Other writing’ Category
The Marvelous List of Updates
Posted on: September 13, 2011
It’s been a busy couple of weeks! I’ve been working on projects both old and new, and I thought I’d give you all an update.
Broken – The print book is still set to come out in late November, and you can still get in on pre-orders over at Kickstarter. The stuff we’ve got as extras is really fun. I actually have some of the action figures, and they are great. When we were down at ComiCONN the action figures at our table were a big draw! Well, that and the Play-Doh. Note to all convention dealers: always have Play-Doh handy.
We’re going to be doing a launch party in early November for the print run, and it’ll be in Western Massachusetts! More details on that will be available soon, but I hope to see lots of you there.
Fly Into Fire (Extrahumans #2) – I’m working through the first round of revisions handed to me by my wonderful editor now, and once again it’s great to see the book improving a little at a time. I’m looking forward to all of you reading this story and meeting these characters. I may do some biographical sketches and other fun stuff of them as we get closer to the release date in January.
The thing about edits and revision requests is that they’re simultaneously painful and amazing. On the one hand, it feels like someone just tossed your manuscript into the woodchipper, but on the other hand it’s nice to actually make the revision and know for a fact that the story is better.
The Spark (Extrahumans #3) – I finished my third edit pass and thought, hey. This is about as good as I can make it. So I sent it off to Candlemark & Gleam on Saturday.
This was a very hard book to write, but I think it was worth the effort. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten into a character’s head the way I got into Dee’s (she’s the main character, you’ll meet her in Fly Into Fire), and I hope that shows through.
The Daughter Star – Ah, my little dark horse book. It’s still undergoing some copyediting, and will be ready for submission soon. I have no idea what will happen to it once I do submit it. For the record, this was my favorite book to write of the four I’ve done so far.
The Demon Girl’s Song (this title will probably change) – I’ve started work on a book about a teenage girl with a thousand-year-old demon stuck in her head, a fisherman’s daughter with a strange and hopeless quest to complete, and a world that keeps developing maddening holes. I’m about 20,000 words in, right now, and so far so good. I may need to take a break to work on edits, but hopefully this one will get done at some point next year.
Extrahumans #4 – Plotting, plotting. Nothing written yet, but the shape of things is starting to form in my tiny mind. I may even have figured out who the main characters are!
Other Stuff – You like Connecticut politics, right? You can find my take on it every week at CT News Junkie. Oh, and check out my essay at 30POV about rejection.
I did submit a short story to a random small press, but now I’m wondering if they’re still in business. Hmm. I better check on that.
And that’s all for now!
POLL: What to Write Next?
Posted on: July 26, 2011
- In: Broken | Fly into Fire | Other writing | The Daughter Star | The Spark
- 2 Comments
Update: Now includes ACTUAL POLL
The writing and revising frenzy of the past seven months or so has subsided, leaving me with two more-or-less complete drafts. I’ve hit the point with THE SPARK (Extrahumans: Book 3) where I’m sick to death of even looking at it, so it’s probably time to set it aside to marinate. In a few weeks I’ll pick it up again, do another editing pass, and then perhaps send it off if it feels ready.
I’m still working through editing THE DAUGHTER STAR, which is a book that I’m not exactly sure what to do with yet. I suppose I could simply glut my publisher to the point where she’s built up a massive backlog of SJB books. Why not? There’s also a few things about it that don’t sit entirely well with me, and I intend to revisit them soon.
My first two books continue to percolate. You can pre-order the print version of BROKEN, which hits shelves in November, through Kickstarter. FLY INTO FIRE, due out in January, now has a Goodreads page–please add it for all kinds of updates! You can also friend me there or become a fan if you want.
This leaves me at an impasse. For the first time in a while, I don’t have a priority fiction project! So, help me out here. What do I write next? Below, find a lovely list of ideas I’ve been kicking around. Help me find some direction already!
What I’m Working On Now
Posted on: June 15, 2011
(concept shamelessly stolen from the amazing Seanan McGuire, whose list puts me to shame)
I know. I never update. There’s a space in Blog Hell reserved for people like me; I only hope I earned enough credit with the Elder WordPress Gods from blogging daily for five years to get me into one of the nicer circles. Y’know, less the “pain and jabbing sticks” punishment section, more the “irony” punishment. Irony I can take; pain’s another story.
For the past six months I’ve done next to nothing but write, write, write. What does that actually mean in terms of what I’m getting accomplished or working on? Here’s the list:
Fly Into Fire – You know about this one if you’ve been following along, it’s the second book in the series I guess I’ll just call “The Extrahumans,” and it’s due out in January. It’s the story of Sky Ranger trying to redeem his lousy self after the events of Broken, among many other things. Mostly what I’ve been doing is nervously awaiting revisions, and changing all the characters in my mind. This is going to be a killer rewrite.
The Daughter Star – Marta Grayline was a happy camper hauling freight back and forth between Nea and Adastre, but when an interstellar war breaks out her life is thrown into absolute chaos. This book is set in a completely! new! world! and is the first in a planned series of books about the adventures of Marta Grayline. Marta kicks my butt, by the way. I love her to death. Right now my awesome wife is helping me out with copy-edits, after I rewrote the ending three entire times. I’m getting to a point where I’m happy enough with it to send it off.
The Spark – This is the working title of “The Extrahumans,” Book Three. This is the story of firestarter/lucky girl Deirdre Burns White’s struggle to reconcile her Extrahuman nature with her desire to live a normal life, all while her city is falling into violence, protest and revolution around her. Dee is a supporting player in Fly Into Fire who pretty much demanded her own book. This is the most difficult and challenging book I’ve ever written, and I have to admit, it’s kicking me around a little. Right now I’m still fighting my way through the rough draft.
Other Stuff – You should see a new piece up at 30pov tomorrow, and I am still writing about Connecticut politics every week at CT News Junkie.
Future Projects – I’m in the planning stages for the second Marta Grayline book, though when I’ll get around to starting it, I have no clue. I’ve also been trying to get started on an urban-fantasy send-up, and I’ve got the initial fight scene in a supermarket all done.
Plus, you know, my day job.
That’s it for now! At least, I think that’s it.
Dear Book, You’re Terrible
Posted on: May 12, 2011
Dear first draft,
Okay. Where the heck did you even come from? You were supposed to be the fun book, the “I need a break from writing the big important OMG has-meanings-and-themes-and-everything book,” my pacer car, my racetrack pony who walks with the cool book during the post parade. I never thought I’d even finish you, much less finish you first.
And now look. Suddenly, a few weeks ago, I hit the completely arbitrary line of 50K words on you, figured out your plot, and then you ate my life. I spent the last week in a fog with your characters, thinking up ways to make them do cool stuff and get to the end of the story. Which I did. Oh yes.
You have terrible writing, especially at the end. Some of the characters are cardboard cutouts with signs hanging around their necks reading “IOU 1(one) personality/soul.” There are a few points where I actually wrote [ADD PLOT HERE]. I think I got all of those but I’m not sure. I’d have to go back and check, and I don’t want to. It’s scary in there.
Latest Writings
Posted on: April 28, 2011
So much new stuff to check out:
Tastes Like Chicken. Sort Of
Do you like Chicken McNuggets? No? Well, check out my 30pov piece Chicken McLife anyway, as I examine my life through McNuggets:
I had a routine. I’d walk into town, a couple of miles from the college, and swing by the comic book store. I’d buy whatever was new. It might have been Battle Angel Alita, The Maxx, Strangers in Paradise or just the latest Batman, but I always picked up two or three issues. Then I’d hike over to the McDonald’s on Colman St., on the edge of the city, and sit for a while reading comic books and eating McNuggets.
For a while, all the chaos in my head stilled, and the world was nothing but a plastic seat, Batman, and some greasy food.
Politics!
I went to a Tea Party rally for no good reason, except to take pictures and write a report. Yes, the signs were amusing. Yes, they had foam pitchforks. The report is here: Tax Day Rally Fizzles.
It has to be a frustrating time for the Tea Party. In Washington, House Republicans are compromising with the hated Obama on the budget and may yet allow the debt limit to be raised. Here in Connecticut, Democrats likely have the votes to pass big tax increases as part of an effort to close the budget gap. The big wins of last year are already fading from memory, and no one seems all that excited about 2012. Unlike 2009 and 2010, there is no one single bill to rally against, no one unifying task.
Two other articles: The Myth of the Easy Answer, which has a lot of my political philosophy in it, and Budget Deal Winners and Losers, which has, um, those.
Etc.
I did a guest post at Reading With Tequila, about superheroes! It wasn’t part of the recent blog tour, so I’m linking to it from here.
In a lot of ways, superhero stories are about those who are different or special in one way or another. Here are people who either have inborn or contracted special abilities or powers, or who are in some other way extraordinary.
And that’s it for now! There’s some big big news to talk about soon, too!
The 50K Word Event Horizon
Posted on: April 8, 2011
This past week I hit a psychological milestone on one of my works-in-progress: 50,000 words written. Hooray! I told Twitter all about it and had a celebratory drink.
Of course, the story’s not nearly finished. We’re just now getting in to some of the major action! If I had to guess, this one will clock in around 80K words, maybe a bit more, but there’s really no telling. Word counts are interesting, but stories take as long as they’re going to take, and books are as long as they are. The word count is usually irrelevant. I know this, intellectually.
And yet! 50K has fixed itself as a major goal in my mind. I think I may blame NaNo for this. I did NaNo back in 2004, (the result of that became BROKEN, which in its final form is a bit under 60K words total), and since then I’ve always thought of 50K in a work-in-progress as some sort of monumental, awe-inspiring, chisel-it-into-a-stone-in-the-desert achievement. When I hit that magic number during the first draft of FLY INTO FIRE, I thought, yes, this might really get finished! And now that I’ve done the same for this work-in-progress, tentatively titled THE DAUGHTER STAR, I’m starting to think that I may have a third novel in me after all. Now that it’s past a certain point, it has a much better chance to survive.
This might be one of the better things that NaNo does by setting that rather arbitrary 50K finish line–once that goal is reached, the work suddenly seems a lot more solid and official. It’s here, it’s past that first big hurdle, and finishing it suddenly seems a lot less daunting.
Of course, now I actually have to do so. I’d better get back to writing.
- In: Broken | Other writing | Politics
- 3 Comments
Before I began my current existence in this world of writers, reviewers and readers, I had no idea what a blog tour was. This came as something of a surprise to me, considering I’d been a political blogger for five years beforehand! However, I’ve learned that this is a way for writers to connect with new audiences by popping up on various book blogs for either a review, or a guest post/interview.
It’s actually been a lot of fun to pull diverse material together for the tour I’ve just begun. I’ll keep you posted about what’s going on with it as it progresses, but so far the tour has gone to two blogs this week:
Hobbitsies – I wrote a little biographical sketch for this site.
Bibliophile Brouhaha – There is a lovely, thorough review of the book up here today.
Planned stops for the rest of this week:
Wednesday: Alisia Leavitt
Thursday: Girls in the Stacks
Friday: Lost for Words
It was a ton of work to get everything put together for this tour, but I had a blast doing it, and I hope you all enjoy the stuff I came up with!
Other updates
Do YOU like early voting? Well, I do, and you can read about it at CT News Junkie. My favorite negative comment on the article asks, “Do you actually think before you make statements like this?” The answer, unsurprisingly, is no. I just make it up as I go along!
New Pieces and Other Updates
Posted on: March 16, 2011
Sorry I haven’t posted here in a bit, I’ve been busy with all kinds of other work! A few updates:
- I have a new piece up at 30Pov, “Sinners in the Hands of a Forgetful God.” The topic for the month is Saints and Sinners, so my mind gravitated for some reason to Jonathan Edwards’s famous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon, which was delivered in the town where I live some 270 years ago. I once had to teach this miserable thing as part of a literature course for high school kids when I was a student teacher. They loved it just about as much as you’d expect. Also: this piece is NOT about gender. I swear! I SWEAR IT TO YOU.
- New at CT News Junkie is this cool piece with a map in it, all about using census data to make more sensible congressional districts. There is no way in hell my plan will happen, but hey.
- Lastly, The Book Smugglers are reviewing BROKEN this Friday, so check that out. Update The review’s up! Here it is
There’s also all kinds of good stuff I’m working on, including new book(s), a short story in the BROKEN universe that will hopefully see release at some point, and an extended blog tour happening next month. I’m busy! It’s great.
New Pieces Here and There
Posted on: February 17, 2011
- In: Other writing | Politics
- 3 Comments
Okay, a few updates from me, writing-wise.
Gender Stuff
I write over at 30pov every month, and usually I write about gender stuff (I’m a transgender person. hi!). I don’t write about it much here, mainly because I’ve spent an awful lot of time writing and thinking about it elsewhere. I was starting to be ready to move on to writing about NOT gender stuff, but the topic for this month was, um, gender. So.
I tried to gather all of my thoughts about gender issues, and found that the subject was a lot more elusive than I initially believed it would be. So I threw in a bunch of cartoons! Like so:
The piece I came up with is an exploration of some of the larger issues, and I think it came out pretty well. Here it is: All the stars in the sky.
Politics
I also watched Gov. Malloy’s budget speech to the legislature yesterday, and came up with a quick response. What struck me the most was that this, finally, is a governor’s budget which has a chance in hell of actually being implemented–and what a year for it. The combination of tax hikes, service/program cuts and union concessions strikes a delicate balance; one I think might work:
It’s very easy to say that the budget relies too much on taxes in a state where the tax burden is already high, or, conversely, that it taxes too little and asks state agencies and workers to shoulder an unequal portion of Malloy’s “shared sacrifice.” I’m sure we’ll hear those arguments again and again between now and June, and in many cases there will be concerns that need addressing. By and large, though, I thought the governor struck as good a balance as possible during these difficult times.
Here’s the story: Malloy’s Budget a Good Start
And those are the updates for this week!
The Extrahuman Union 