Works In Progress
Hard to believe its been almost a week since my last update on writing. I never did reach my goal last week with The Dreaming Pools, though before I get home today I will have hit the 70k mark for words. Its almost surreal, even as the author, to see the threads I've been weaving through the story start to come together for the end of book one. Things that my imagination spuriously sprinkled into the weave of the story for flavor are coming up out of nowhere as the binding glue for ending book one. I'm not yet convinced I will make 80k for the first draft, but I've started preparing myself for the rewrite, which I already know will require a little cutting and a lot more stuffing, so that initial 80k mark should be doable before my deadline.
If you missed it on twitter, I did finish that short story I was working on yesterday afternoon. Working title is still Where Was I? though I'm trying to come up with something a wee bit more appropriate (maybe The Lady of the Oak?). Rereading it last night, I saw a few things I need to do to it, including changing the name of the protagonist ("Greta" just isn't working for me - sorry Greta's of the world, I know Garbo certainly did nothing to detract from it as a name, but it just isn't working in this context). So that tweak and a few other minor edits/rewrites for that one.
Gingerbread Man was rejected by clarkesworld, which wasn't actually earth shattering. Another case, I think, where if I had taken the time to let it sit for a few days, I would have seen a few flaws in it. I've made some notes for the re-draft, and hope to have it in the mail later this week for consideration elsewhere. The rejection aside, I must say, I really do appreciate clarkesworld's entire submission process. Its all online, with a ticket number that you can reference to see where you are in the queue (without annoying anyone). Being someone who routinely !!'s a command in *nix to see if the output has changed (or worse, someone who will go so far as to write a one liner shell script to update the screen every second so I can see the instant it changes), I appreciated the system they use immensely.
Of dubiously surprising benefit is the reorganization I did of my stories/files for converting from windows/ywriter to linux. Although in a previous post I pointed at gvim as the ultimate editor for this setup, I've come to recognize that what I've done is more of a methodology and framework that frees me of being bound to a single tool. Case in point, I can work on any piece of any story in just about any text editor available, because ultimately my works now are just a collection of text files. Formatting for submission occurs via abiword just before submitting, but up till that point I can use vim, gvim, gedit, abiword, whatever I want, platform independent. For the linux geek in me, that's nice 
OK, back to work for me. I've laid out my plans for the week here, but, you know how it goes - to quote me from that story with character formerly known as Greta - "Time is a fickle mistress", so we'll see where what I want to do and what I have time to do actually coincide.
Happy writing folks,
Mike
If you like this you might like...
Enjoy this article?
