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Confessions of a Creataholic
Black Flag UpdateAccording to my progress log, I have reached page 150. According to my production calculations, I have completed 75% of the first draft. That looks remarkably like a milestone to me. Yay! My husband wants me to take a break from Black Flag so I can work on book covers, though. I’d better hurry up and get started on that. Not only do I not want Black Flag to fall behind, I intend to start writing my next book next week. Lots of things to get done. No time for dawdling. … I wish I had a second laptop, if I had two I could do twice as much, right? (That’s not as silly as it sounds. 3D art takes a lot of resources, making doing anything else on my computer while a render is going somewhat problematical.) Wham!My daughter Alloria has joined a writing club, so on Thursdays I pick her up from school. This is not a major chore — the distance to the school is probably not much more than a mile. When I was a girl I would have walked that distance, but the the local school system really doesn’t like to have the kids walking home through the center of town and they make a special point of telling the parents that we have to pick up our children if for some reason they cannot be bussed home. Today, just as I was pulling out to turn left off of main street and onto the road the school is on, there was a loud crash, and a jerk, and all of a sudden I was out in the middle of the intersection. I quickly and dazedly pulled off to one side, and got out of my minivan… … and there was this car stuck to the back of my van. With the front crumpled in. I’m fine, but there is a sizable dent in the back of the minivan, and the shock of the impact appears to have broken the driver’s seat. The backrest falls backwards, as if the catch you pull to lean the chair back is constantly being pulled. I’m not sure about the other fellow. There was some waiting for cops and ambulance and fire trucks to show up during which he did not move from his driver’s seat, and didn’t look too healthy, although not visibly hurt. He told the ambulance guy he was okay, but that’s all I ever heard him say. He did get out of his car later, though, when I was fetching my paperwork out of my glove compartment, so he can’t have been too badly hurt. I hope. The people who had come over to see if I was okay (and leant me a cell-phone so I could let my kids know what had happened) apparently explained to the police that I was supposed to be picking my daughter up from school, so after they got his car separated from mine, and I’d handed over my license and registration, the cops sent me off to collect her. (The school was just down the road a bit.) When I got back, everything had been cleaned up except for his car with the crumpled in front, and only the police man I’d given my paperwork to was still there. He asked for my insurance info (I’d overlooked the insurance card when I was pulling paperwork from the glove-compartment earlier), and then told me it wasn’t my fault and sent me home. …And the fact that it just took me that many words to say “hey, guess what, I was in a car accident today” I guess explains why I’m not on twitter. Another Yay!I have finished the storyboards for Black Flag 2: Blood Price. Blood Price came in at 232 pages, but that’s not counting chapter title pages, which would put it up to about 250. That’s a chunk longer than Black Flag 1, at 222 pages, but I’m expecting Black Flag 1 to grow a bit more, as I finish the last third of the pages (hopefully sometime this year), and then head into revisions. I still need to finish deciding where the chapter divisions go, name my chapters, and scan everything. I’m very, very tempted to recycle the chapter titles from 1. My husband warned that I might end up finding myself in a bind that way, feeling locked into the same chapter titles for all the Black Flag stories, but I don’t think so. The script to Black Flag 3: Dominion, is twice as long as the one for Blood Price, and the first two books are more strongly tied together than the second and the third. Anyway, I’m now back to Scent of Spring for my pencil and paper project, and will once again be hauling my pretty art around, instead of a lot of horrible scribbles. That will be nice. I loooooove Blood Price, but confess to feeling a bit abashed when people got curious as to what I was doing. I can draw better than that, really — just when storyboarding something I will be doing in 3D there’s no point. Worrying about getting it to look right just slows me down. It took me a LOT longer than a month and a half to do the Scent of Spring storyboards, and that was for a much shorter story. Taking my victories where I find them.I’ve been working on revising Dicing with Flames, the sequel to Talking with Winds. My husband read it, and said it was mostly good, but he had some problems with the beginning. So I did some rewrites. Today my eldest son, who liked Talking With Winds best of all my stories to date, starting reading it. He began this morning and read it straight through to evening, start to finish in one go. It did not disappoint. Yay! Random bits heard around my house this holiday season…“No, no, no! You don’t want a basilisk as a familiar!” “And then you can go home, and change your feet.” “I think I’ll buy another harem.” “You know, if you use a lawnmower, you may not even need the walnuts.” “I unlocked the snowman!” A little gift for my writer friends.I made the following image to use for “Pieces of Flair” on Facebook. (It’s a virtual button collecting game.)
To my astonishment, people are actually adding the button I made to their “flair boards” (not just the people I sent it to, that wouldn’t astonish me, but other people too), and so I thought maybe some of my other writer friends might find some uses for it. Freely available for non-commercial use. You can copy it, distribute it, shrink down for avatars — whatever. …And, speaking of me being astonished, that little recording of me singing the first verse of the Talon March that I posted for Talk Like a Pirate Day, has been downloaded 72 times this month. ?!?!?! I found the latest two downloads in my “most recent visitors list” and they were apparently made by two different people and both were “direct access” links. That seems a little odd. Even if you count up everyone on livejournal and facebook, I still don’t think I have 72 friends who actually read this blog, and besides it was posted a while ago. So unless I have a few friends listening to it over and over, that song is loose on the net somewhere. IncomeI made money yesterday. Somebody bought one of my tshirts on Zazzle. This happens maybe once a year if I’m lucky — I’m not actually trying to sell any of that stuff, it’s mostly just things I made for me and my family. This is the design that caught someone’s eye this time: My youngest daughter was particularly happy to hear about the sale… that was one of the tshirts I made for her, and she helped me with it. While I’m on the subject of my zazzle tshirts. This particular shirt gets me a lot of comments when I wear it to cons… The Sails of Everwind first draft……is complete at 117 418 words. WordcountWhen I finished working on Sails of Everwind today, I hit the wordcount function, and it told me I had 111666 words. I hope there isn’t anything significant about that. It was only ever an estimate, after all.Sails of Everwind just passed the 100K words mark, and so is at an estimated 100+%, which breaks my progress bar. I guess now would be a good time to remove the 8K or so words right at the beginning that I have decided I don’t want… that’ll give me a little more working room before I break my progress bar all over again. Feedback on Velvet Lies
'You create instantly vivid characters...' -- Mary Anne Stout
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| Copyright © Michelle Bottorff |
