Cultivator
Universe

I passed the 50K word mark on Sails of Everwind today. As I’m not sure how long the story will actually be, I can’t know where halfway point will be. But 50K is half of my target wordcount, so I’m going to celebrate that, whether the story itself is halfway done, or not. 🙂

My husband informed me during our evening walk that he had come up with a great short description of my Ice Wolf books: Andre Norton meets Errol Flynn.

Because of something said on my lj “friends list”, I spent a good chunk of yesterday rereading the rough draft of Dicing With Flames (Song of Asolde, Book Two). Nobody else has ever read it, because I’m waiting to do revisions until I’ve finished writing the first draft of Sails of Everwind (Ice Wolf, Book Two — but I’m trying to write it so that it can stand on its own if need be), and in the meantime some of the places and many of the minor characters are still called ????.

Song of Asolde is a standard fantasy quest epic. It’s got elves. It’s got prophesies. It’s even got plot coupons. You wouldn’t believe how many times I have been told how awful it must therefore be, by people who have never read it. I was even told, on one notable occasion, that I shouldn’t hang out with the real writers, I should stick with the Dragonlance fanfic writers, where I belonged.

Clearly Song of Asolde does not appear to be designed to win the hearts of agents, please the critics, advance my reputation as a writer, and all that jazz. But I like it. And although the world in general may mock, most of the people who actually read book one seem to be looking forward to the second installment.

…So I guess I ought to stop whinging, and get busy drafting Sails of Everwind, so that I can get back to it. (37 620 words of Sails so far… it may be going slowly, but it is going. Real Life may be able to get in my way, but it can’t hold me back completely!)

I finished the script to Black Flag 3 last week.

Afterward I spent several days happily re-reading it and going, ‘look… squee! — dashing young pirate getting mugged by a bunch of fusty lawyers — dashing young pirate removing his shirt in court so he can present his muscles as evidence — dashing young pirate getting told he’s ‘too domestic’ while he is in the middle of shooting down armed invaders — bwahahahah!’ and then going back and reading the Black Flag 2 script so I could compare. The script for 2 is only half as long as the script for 3… “there must be something wrong with one or the other of them. Lets check…. aahhh, 2… now here is a man who knows how to get things done. Ooh, yeah! I love this story. Oh. Um…. Better check over 3 again. Yay, dashing young pirate telling off evil spy-chick, woot! But, still twice as long. Hmm… better go check 2 again…”

But now my brain seems to have decided that I should be working on Black Flag 4.

Unfortunately, I only have 2/3rds of the art for Black Flag 1 done. Scripting 2 makes some sort of sense, but scripting 3 was, without a doubt, jumping the gun a little — scripting 4 would just be ridiculous.  Obviously I need to hurry up and get some more spaceships built so I can get back to doing actual artwork, or I’m going to drive myself bonkers.  But it’s hard concentrating on spaceships, when the theater in my head is trying to play romantic scenes between a space-pirate genius inventor chick and the slave-owning ruler of an iron age nation who has been told since birth that he is a god.

The next Ice Wolf story has gotten a thousand words or so further along too. As usual, Bambi is about to get in a fight: If she doesn’t win, she’s in big trouble; she’s not at all sure that she can win, and…
…even if she actually does win, she’s still in big trouble. >:)

Meanwhile Serena has discovered that it is possible to for someone to sidetrack her empathic abilities by the completely innocent means of having a crush on her.  Whenever he’s with her any other emotions he might feel get drowned out by the “isn’t she wonderful… and she even said she’d go out with me, whee!” euphoria.  And if that wasn’t distracting enough, he’s also really cute, and almost as big as she is.  Too bad he’s the opposition.

This, apparently, is what the Official Award Certificate looks like.

Here’s the book sighting I was talking about in the previous post:

I asked if I could repost it somewhere public so that my fellow contributors could make use of it, and was told “Permission given. We are all very impressed with this book.” Feel free to link to it directly, I got plenty of bandwidth.

If your sister uploads a whole bunch of family reunion photos (from a family reunion that couldn’t make it to) and one of them shows your mother reading your book (or more precisely an anthology that has your story in it), does that count as an “in the wild” book sighting?

Does the fact that you did not give your mother a copy of the book and she (or someone else in the family) must have gone to an actual bookstore to get it, have an effect on whether or not it’s an “in the wild” sighting or not?

And would it count as an “in the wild” sighting for the *other* authors in the anthology?
(If so, I ought to check if that album is available to to the public so I know if I can share a link with them… but not right now, I’m off to Lissa’s next appointment.)

My husband was home today, and is very determined about getting his own private copy of Eyes of Infistar as soon as possible, so we spent most of the day turning the submission manuscript into a print ready pdf. He’s mucking with the cover as I write this. (We’ve been getting a lot of ‘can’t save, program error’ messages with that one, I think just because it’s so huge.)

He said that his design goal for this project was “just slightly tacky”.
I told him the correct term was “camp”.

However, as he has included on the cover the line “The Greatest Adventure since Zargoth and the Death Ray.” I think maybe “tacky” has won the day. 🙂

I did try to get some stuff done on my own projects, but forward progress there was minimal. Ah well.

Apparently, not only is Polaris (the anthology that contains my story “Frozen Witness”) on the ballot for an Aurora, it has also been short listed for the Canadian Science Writers’ Association Awards.

I remember being rather nervous about the fact that my story had to be vetted by a team of scientists before it could be published in this anthology. I guess this is what makes that extra bit of fingernail chewing worth it. 🙂

Dicing With Flames is back in production.I’m not up to full speed yet, but while nattering in rec.arts.sf.compostion about what all I’m working at, I got a ‘sounds fascinating’ about Song of Asolde, a ‘sounds fun’ about Eyes of Infistar, and a ‘will you get these stories finished already!’ about Black Flag all within a 24 hour span, so I’m feeling too happy-bouncy right now to angst over being 1105 words shy of my week’s quota.