Raccciman’s World

At least, I avoided the part of work that feels like work. My copyeditor sent back Eyes of Infistar when I was on vacation last week, and this morning I did not start going through her suggested changes.

Instead I diddled around online for a couple hours while trying to convince myself to do the edits, and finally said “I think it’s not happening, why don’t I just write?”

So, a full day’s quota of words were written.

But I do need to get to those copy edits eventually. 🙁

Eyes of Infistar is at my copyeditor. (She reported that she was enjoying it and that it was nice to be working on something that is “actually good” which gives me a glow of accomplishment, but also makes me think that there might be some drawbacks to being a freelance editor-for-hire.
Sails of Everwind has been edited according to editorial demand and is ready to be reread and hopefully approved to go off to the copy editors next.
Lioness is being read by readers…

I just ran out of editing projects to work on. Looks like I get to start writing the next book already. Only a few weeks after finishing the last one. Awesome!

Fencing With Waves, it is your turn!

I have finished the first draft of a historical pirate romance set on the same world as Across a Jade Sea. It took me about a year to write. I don’t know exactly how long it is, because I wrote it out by hand, but at 281 pages, with my average page of longhand being somewhere between 150-200 words, it is clearly a full novel in length. That makes it my 13th completed novel.

Unless Lioness ends up getting split into a duology. Which is very possible.

Either way, 13th or 14th, it’s still a milestone, and I still get to celebrate. 🙂

I started working on it because I wasn’t feeling very well, and I was having trouble putting in a regular work day (especially since my computer had been moved out of my bedroom due to family computer-shortage issues). But I really wanted to be writing something, so I said: ‘Why don’t I write longhand? That way I can take it to bed with me, and I can tell myself, ‘it doesn’t matter how good it is, because I can fix it when I type it up later’. Also, I can just work on one of the random shorter things in my head that isn’t in the regular queue, so that if I start feeling better I won’t mind abandoning it for something else.” (I thought it would be ‘shorter’. I don’t always guess right when it comes to length.)

By the time I felt better — several months later — I had at least 50 000 words, and I didn’t want to abandon it. I wanted to get it written.

But now it is written, and I can finally get back to my ‘regularly scheduled’ work. Yay!
Which means: getting the two Bambi books ready to go off to my copy editor; finishing my first pass edits on Lioness, so I can get reader feedback; and then writing Book Four of Song of Asolde, Fencing With Waves.

I’m kind of eager to get to Fencing With Waves, because while in the middle of the rush to the end with the Pirate thingy, I took a week off to get the previous Song of Asolde book into a state where I could send it to my oldest daughter as a birthday present — she has been eagerly awaiting the next installment in that series for a few years now. So now I have that story in my head, but I really need to finish off some of my other projects first. Sigh.

…It doesn’t seem real yet, but maybe if I post about it, that will help.

Song of Asolde, Book 3: Dancing With Stones (~90 000 words)
First draft: COMPLETED.

It’s going to feel really strange, but my kids are on their spring break, so I think I’m going to officially declare myself “on vacation” for the rest of the week.

Yesterday I passed the 50% mark on my current WIP.

Of course, that 50% is based on a guesstimated length of 100K words, because I don’t know how many words it will be until I get there. So I may have actually not have gotten to halfway yet, or I might have passed it a while back.

But fifty thousand words is worth celebrating in any case. So, Yay!

My writing progress bar finally advanced today, after sitting at the same spot for more time than I really like to contemplate. Not that I wasn’t writing, in all that time, you understand. I actually wrote an entire trilogy while my progress bar remained stuck, because I wrote it longhand, and therefore did not track my daily wordage. And after that I was doing revisions, which I don’t track on a progress bar either. (But I would love to figure out how to track revision progress, so if anyone has any brilliant ideas about that, please share them!)

But I finally came back to the story I was working on when the attack trilogy attacked me. Yay! Here’s to hoping that I can keep at it until it’s done and that nothing interrupts it this time. I don’t like leaving partially finished stories lying around all over the place… they nag at me.

The printed versions of Dicing With Flames and Pavane in Pearl and Emerald have arrived. I think the cover for Pavane turned out particularly well. My eldest son read it, and said that he thinks he may like it better than Cantata.

Meanwhile I continue to plug away at Black Flag and the website overhaul.

Started playing with a “document processor” called Lyx, in my free time, ended up importing and marking up The Raven and The Veil, and then while I was reading through I decided the ending wasn’t as strong as it could be, so I rewrote it. It is now 4000 words longer. Hopefully that’s a good thing.

The cover artwork for Dicing with Flames isn’t done yet. I’m having trouble with the rock textures… and since the scene I’m doing is underground, it’s almost all rock. I put a Black Flag page together today anyway.

I stopped writing the story I wasn’t supposed to be writing, and started up work on Black Flag again instead. I’ve also been working on a major overhaul of my writing website (it fits fairly nicely into the chunks of time I spend rendering Black Flag art, and I can keep working at it when I’m really too tired to be doing much that is creative). The website work somehow managed to include me teaching my website to play Crazy Eights (or more precisely a game played with the cards from one of my story worlds that closely resembles Crazy Eights/Uno) because my cat was getting dusty (I don’t actually have a cat, but when has that ever stopped me?) and it was New Year’s, which is a holiday, so I wasn’t supposed to be working anyway. The card game page won’t go live until the new site does, though, and at present that seems very far in the future, because…

My daughter has been bugging me about the sequel to Talking With Winds. She doesn’t want to read it on a computer screen, she wants a book. ‘Please’ and ‘it’s for your daughter’ and ‘you have all that free time so why can’t you get it done?’ I can get it done, just not while simultaneously working on Black Flag and a website and getting a novel finished before March. But I have been meaning to get it printed up, along with Pavane, for quite a while now, so…

At least it’s a fairly short, self contained project. I should be able to get it finished quickly, and get back to my other projects. ::crosses fingers::

End! End! End! I got to the end!The first draft of Dicing With Flames is complete at 95347 words.:happy dance!: :bounce!: :yay!: :woot!:(Other celebratory noises as required.):D