Cultivator
Universe

Eyes of Infistar is submitted.
It is now too late to worry about it anymore.

Hopefully I have a year before I have to think about it again much, and I can finally get back to Asond, Samanth and company.

Although, maybe that's being a bit too hopeful. Boyd wants a private printed copy of Eyes, and thus has got cover pictures on his brain. What do I think, he wants to know, of having Algernon striking a heroic pose while Peluge holds up a couple fingers behind his head?

I think that Peluge and Algernon, fun as they are, are not the main characters and shouldn't be allowed to dominate the cover.

Besides, I don't have *time* to work on cover pictures, which are BIG and require a great deal of time consuming attention to detail. Black Flag is behind schedule, Dicing With Flames is supposed be done in February, and I promised myself I would complete the storyboards for Scent of Spring before the end of December.

I'm also in the middle of an overhaul of my writing site.

I have 116 pages worth storyboards for Scent of Spring now, and have reached page 53 of 60 in my script. My calculator says that's 88%, which would make the total length estimate 131 pages. Fifteen more pages to go. My estimated start of 'actual writing' date was today, which I'm obviously going to miss, but I might not be more than a month behind. That's not bad considering this is a third or fourth string project.

Dicing With Flames continues to remain on hold while I do revisions on Eyes of Infistar.

When I'm doing revisions I have a much harder time sticking to a do-so-much-and-no-more type schedule than when I'm writing, so I have a tendency to do a whole lot one day, wear myself out, and spend the next day doing nothing much at all. I'm probably doing just as much actual “work” as I do normally, but the stop and go format is a lot more frustrating. Today I'm on stop, so I need to find something I can do while brain-dead. Blah.

What I did yesterday while brain-dead, was read aloud the first three volumes of Girl Genius, while my kids followed along over my shoulder. I'm pretty good at reading aloud (even if I do say so myself) and it's great material to work with. As I've already read through what's available on my own at least three times already, I only ended up laughing when I was supposed to be delivering lines once or twice. It's a bit awkward working off a web-page, though. Sometimes I don't scroll down far enough, and I miss a speech bubble or two down at the bottom of the page.

The Donald Maass Literary Agency has a page “This month we are looking for….”, and the latest is Quirky detectives we would like to meet. It just so happens that I have this story I'm supposedly revising, which features quirky detectives. Of course, they seem to be expecting detectives to be found in mystery genre queries, not science fiction, but this way I can give them (almost) what they ask for and surprise them at the same time. Sounds perfect, right?

Okay, maybe not perfect. But it was a tempting enough situation that I have written and snail-mailed a query letter, hoping it would arrive while “this month's” request was still in effect and maybe, therefore, get a smidgen of extra attention. Which means I really can't afford to delay working on Eyes anymore, because you never know, they might ask to see it. (It seems a pity to abandon the characters of Dicing With Flames in the situation they are in, but the mountain can't collapse on them if I'm not there to tell it to, so they can wait.)

So, if you have read Eyes, and sent me comments, and I did not respond saying, 'yes I got them, thank you very much', then I didn't get them. Could you please try sending them again? I would love a chance to thank you for the effort you have gone to on my behalf.

And if you haven't sent me any comments, well, anything you can get to me in the next three weeks or so, will be greatly appreciated. 🙂

I was reading Romancing the Blog (because I can't find the oompha to do anything) and happened on this discussion of romantic hero archetypes listed as being: Chief, Bad Boy, Best Friend, Lost Soul, Charmer, Professor, Swashbuckler and Warrior.

And I found myself thinking: “Is Silver a Lost Soul? I hope not, because Heathcliff is the listed example, and I couldn't stand Heathcliff. And yet, Silver is a Lost Soul. Phooey! And Blood is a Bad Boy, another archtype I despise. Grumble. That isn't all they are, though… they are both Chiefs. And, both Professors…”

Bad Boy Professor. Lost Soul Chief.
Bwahahaha!
Okay, realizing that you have put together some unusual combinations is sort of fun…

…but mostly I don't get the attraction of classifying one's heroes this way. If, say, Darcy from _Pride and Prejudice_ is a Chief and my Ikhsior from Cantata is a Chief, where does that get me? Trying to equate the two in my head just makes me go :glurk!: Other than that they both have a commanding presence (as they would say at the Coral Palace) what have they got in common, and why should I care? (Actually, I think Silver has a lot more in common with Darcy, although I would not classify Darcy as a Lost Soul.)

But, for the record, as close as I can figure, my hero's archetypes
Ikhsior: Chief (That seems so inadequate, but what else fits?)
Asond: Chief (Those two are the *same* archetype? Pardon me while I glurk again.) Professor
Algernon: Swashbuckler
Kide: Charmer
Silver: Lost Soul, Chief, Professor
Blood: Bad Boy, Professor, Chief
Talon: Charmer, Chief, Swashbuckler
Turner: Swashbuckler, er… Turner's reflexes are so fast and deadly that he tends to kill people without really meaning to. Does that make him a Warrior, a Bad Boy, or a Lost Soul?
Harchung: Chief
Cabal: Lost Soul, Professor, Warrior

I'm a bit short on Best Friends. Maybe because I married one?

I think the overabundance of Chiefs is not a romantic issue but something else entirely. It goes back to the question “Why are the main characters in fantasies almost always royalty?” If I take that one on it probably ought to be a different post.

I have been trying to devise a hook for Eyes of Infistar.
And I'm having trouble. (No surprise, I guess, this hook writing business is hard).

My first temptation is to say something on the order of…

From the hackneyed tradition of Lin Carter, E. E. Doc Smith, James H. Schmitz, and Edgar Rice Burroughs comes…

THE EYES OF INFISTAR (Space operatic adventure/mystery.)

It's got a stolen alien artifact (because all space operas need mysterious artifacts left carelessly lying about by progenitor aliens). It's got a galactic empire (because no space opera is complete without a galactic empire no matter how politically implausible that might be). It's got a gorgeous kick-ass heroine whose sister is an eight foot tall empath and whose brother is a blue ape. (I am credibly informed that space operas don't require that one's heroine have hairy blue relatives, but I figure even a devoted tribute like this one can use a few original elements.)

The swinging planetary romance plot predictably has our heroine (and stud-muffin admirer) chasing cunning villains across an alien landscape. And the climax is a high octane shoot out with space pirates taking place in — you guessed it — a primitive temple. With every cliche in the lexicon, how could it possibly fail to be fun?

…Okay, not quite every cliche. Gotta save some for the sequel.

I somehow suspect this doesn't qualify as a hook. It certainly doesn't follow the recommended format. 🙁
And the 'how could it possibly fail to be fun' line is just asking to be slapped, (but it fits perfectly with the tone of the rest of it.) ::sigh::

I spent today's editing session tracking down a bunch of the loose ends in Eyes of Infistar and tucking them neatly in place.
Yesterday I had gotten right up through the climax, and had decided that I probably needed to expand the rest out a bit rather than simply tidy it up. I have a tendency to end my rough drafts very abruptly.

But I needed to clean up all the other loose ends so I would know which ones would be tied up in the denouement, right?

And since I'm hoping to do a sequel, maybe I shouldn't be too eager to clean up the ones that remain. I can always wait until I have reader feedback, and only fix the ones they complain about… >;)

Flag in Flames is up to 5.5 pages.

I got my copy of the Polaris Anthology today!
Yay! A real book, by a real publisher.

I also finished the tricky bit in Eyes where I had to make the story go from where it originally went, to where I decided three chapters later I should have made it to go. I had to rewrite that bit three times before I actually managed to get the story headed in the right direction.

AND…

… I completed Page 3 of Flag in Flames

It took me longer than I expected: It was a six panel page. the renders take a long time, and I ended up re-rendering every single one of them in full size at least twice. :sigh:

I've started setting up my renders and getting them going *before* doing my writing, so that I have a hope of finishing two on the same day.

The kids had three days off school and a two hour delay this week too, so they didn't miss much of my sister's visit at all. She left Thursday, after making me birthday cake (with dragons on it!). Yesterday Boyd took me out to dinner, and then we attended the Columbus Area Boardgaming Society and played games all evening.

I'm over halfway done with the Eyes of Infistar first revision pass. Today I found a couple small continuity problems I hadn't noticed in my read through, but they were pretty easy to fix. I also got Harp & Gyre ready to go to WotC, but it's still sitting on a shelf in my bedroom because no one wants to chip the family van out of the ice — or drive it in this weather. And naturally Boyd's work van is never available when the post office is open. (It's snowing again too.)

So I'm off to work on Black Flag. I'm maybe a third of the way through page 3, but the next bit is somewhat scary. Four characters in the same scene is going to be an enormous strain on my system, and slower than molasses to work with. Wish I had bigger, faster, more ubercool hardware. And more memory. And more storage. And more…

Hmm… Didn't I already write a song about that?
>:)

I am about a third of the way through Eyes of Infistar.

I have also completed page two of Flag in Flames. Hopefully the next 202 pages will go a little faster. 🙂

Have written my summary of Eyes — in double columns, so I can easily both scan each plot thread separately and compare/contrast them.
Discovered that the continuity error at the climax could be solved by rewriting one sentence, and rewrote the sentence.
Did more language stuff.
Worked on Tortuga station, which is slowly taking shape. I need to figure out how detailed it has to be.

Also, a friend heard me singing “Silver's Theme” and, not knowing it was written by me, remarked “that's a pretty song”. :glow: (When my husband and son heard “Silver's Theme” their reaction was more on the order of: “Er… :shudder: you know that Silver guy isn't exactly… um…” Of course, my friend didn't hear much of the words, so she was really just referring to the tune, but I'm happy to have gotten the compliment anyway.)