Ialfa

Crimson Courtesies, Velvet Lies
Word Count: 9726

Crimson Courtesies, Velvet Lies
Word Count: 7195

Crimson Courtesies, Velvet Lies
Word Count: 5500
Estimated Length: 32 000

(There goes the theory that I might have written a novel. And if this one isn't, the two from the Juvenalia aren't either, since they have a few fewer pages to them. So it really is only 6.)

Boyd has asked me to please get back to work on some cover art for Cantata. He feels it is important that this be done (although he admits that he doesn't know *why* he feels it is important.) I told him that if I just did it in the place of my regular art projects and didn't give it priority over, say, writing, I expected it would take me between a month and a half and two months. So, no more Black Flag and no more Chaos Circle for the next couple of months it looks like. Although, I did do some pointless background stuff (an alphabet) for the Cultivator webpages today while waiting at the testing center for Alloria to finish taking her tests, because I didn't want to bring the mouse or pen tablet, and I wasn't awake enough to write yet.

Crimson Courtesies, Velvet Lies
Word Count: 3300
Estimated Length: 38 000

I did about 1400 more words of the Crimson Courtesies, Velvet Lies transcription/rewrite.

I then did a rough total wordage calculation based on how many pages of stuff I had transcribed and how many words I had written as compared to total pages in the handwritten draft. The darn thing will probably turn out to be between 35 000 and 40 000 words. :::grumble::: It's from reading too many Nero Wolfe stories, isn't it? Most of them feel about that length. That's why they come in omnibuses of threes and fours so often.

Anyway, I want to get this one done, so that I can start on a short story for the anthology I've been invited to submit to without this one pestering me.
The next story, (Frozen Witness?), is another murder mystery, like Lies, only this one is set in a frozen wasteland and the key to unraveling it is scientific insight instead of cultural insight. (And if it isn't a whole lot shorter, I'm going to be mad at myself. I can't submit a Novella.)

Oh! I just had the strangest thought. If Lies turns out to be just *over* 40 000 words, instead of just under, I have officially written 7 complete novel manuscripts since my Juvenalia period, instead of 6. Add the two I finished when I was a teen, and I've completed 9 novel manuscripts. Yowza!

Yesterday I didn't do much. I went swimming. and continued transferring the CD archives for all my 3D graphics stuff onto my brand new external hard-drive so that I can sort and install. While the computer was busy copying 40 megs of zip files, I put the map I made on Thursday for Ialfa (along with 400 words of Lies that I am feeling ambivalent about) onto my website and made it into an image map, because I hadn't played with the imagemap tool in Webdesign yet, and I wanted to see how it worked.

I haven't uploaded the results because the map image shows geography only, no political boundaries or place names, and because most of the pages that the clickable regions lead to are still completely blank.

I don't want to work on Lies more until Boyd's looked at the first 400 words and told me what he thinks. I may need to find a different voice, and that's best done before I write too much in the one I've got. Besides, I'm pretty sure I'm still too fuzzy.

I don't want to play with my map because I did that yesterday. (Picky, aren't I?) I'm trying to pull up the mental list of what all else I have to be doing and it's not materializing. It's like I can't remember any of my intentions from further back than two days ago. Chaos Circle vaguely presents itself. What was I *at* on Chaos Circle? Ah, 3D character creation. And for Black Flag, *also* 3D character creation. No wonder I didn't want to work with those in the middle of a huge 3D reorganization. Which means: no working on something new for me. It's back to the stuff I was working on yesterday. Blah. Mapping, I think. I need to draw two more continents on the map I've got, and then I need to do a blow up of the Empire of Borgim, I suspect the locations of the Principalities is going to matter a good deal more in Pavane than it did in Cantata.

I have completed the handwritten first draft of a murder mystery set in the Coral Palace (the same physical location as my novel _Cantata in Coral and Ivory_, but a slightly later time period), which I am tentatively titling “Courteous Crystal Lies”

I don't like the length it turned out, which looks like it will be between 15 000 and 20 000 words, because it seems to me that is a very awkward size to market. But it was fun to write anyway.

Now I need to find the time/energy to type it into the computer.