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Racciman's World News

Cabin Fever

It seems to me the longer I've not gone out anywhere in person, the less likely I am to do any social interacting online. That's a little odd, isn't it? Shouldn't I be doing more online stuff in an attempt to compensate?

Lately I've written about ten times more responses to rec.arts.sf.composition postings than I've a actually posted. I keep going “no one wants to hear you ramble on about yourself or your stories”, and I delete them. When I went to post this I had the option of restoring a draft of an entry about getting some more rejections slips, which I had decided against posting. I haven't even had Bonnie Anne or Talon respond to the latest questions posted on the character chat thread over at the Webcomic List forums.

So I decided that at the very least I should make a progress update type lj posting.

I am back to writing again, after taking three weeks off to crit a novel for a crit buddy. (Unfortunately I slept through a good chunk of those three weeks, so she didn't get three weeks worth of crit out of it.) :sigh:

Dicing With Flames passed 53K yesterday. Yay! Forward motion!
But I don't seem to have enough energy to work on two things at once, so Black Flag and Scent of Spring are stalled.
The in-my-head theater has mostly been running Black Flag 4 & 5. (Why does it have to be five? That's the icky one.)

Maybe they have a bad case of elves.

And behold at the week's commence I did send out a query requesting information about the submission that has languished now at the same house for nigh on these two years.

And this very day did I receive an most courteous answer…

And the answer was neither yes,
nor no.

It is, I am informed, still “on the list”.

And I, not having devised any schemes or actions to take in such a case,
intend to do nothing.

I am, after all, busy writing the next… er, fourth book.

(Poor, Asond! He so hates to be wrong, and I have been putting him in situations where there isn't a right answer. I suspect he will have something pithy and very annoyed to say on the subject tomorrow.)

Because it was kind of neat…

Today's wordcount: 29600

No, I did not round it off. 🙂

Edit: Apparently I need to clarify…
That's a total words in book wordcount.
The number of words written that day was only a thousand and some, as usual.

I just thought it was neat… er, tidy. Stopping on an even hundred like that. My wordprocessor doesn't keep a running count (I wouldn't want it to if it could, I'd find it too distracting), and I had no idea what number I had gotten to until after I stopped and told it to add 'em all up.

Just the joy of creation never seems enough

Chapter eight of the Complete Idiot's Guide to Music Theory ends by asking you to write three short tunes to certain specifications. ( I cheated a little on the third one. I *could* have notated it in 4/4 time like it asked, but it was so much easier notate in 12/8.)

And now I have these three tunes, see, and I find myself wondering … 'So what am I going to do with them?'
Could someone please convince me that I don't actually have to do anything with them at all?

They are nagging at me now. The first one wants another eight measures, the second one is interested in being expanded also, if I would be so kind, and they all want lyrics so that I might possibly end up singing them somewhere or something. Arrg!

In other news, I've got about 25K words of the second Asolde book, and I did two more Black Flag pages, but my father just asked me to take on a large project for him.

Naturally…

Haven't been reading usenet…
Haven't been reading my livejournal friendslist…
Have a nasty head cold.

So of course I have a convention coming up this weekend.

I so don't feel ready for even socializing, let alone this networking thingy I'm supposed to be trying to do.
I'm going to go anyway, of course.

And on the plus side, I did get three good writing days in (book is now over 5000 words long), so maybe my mental condition is improving :crosses fingers:

And I have done a lot of stuff on Black Flag, even though none of it is actual pages. (I was a hairsbreadth from getting back to doing pages — got the space armor working… Yay! — and my 3D modeling program decided to go all wonky. Grrr! So I've been building characters and continuing to work on the website while waiting for some tech support.)

Oh, and the Scent of Spring sketches continue to go well. I'm on chapter six or seven or something like that.

A week to catch up on

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?
>:)

Submission Nerves Addendum

Have checked. Agents A, B, C, D & E really do want to see a brief query letter describing the book in question, only. No part of the story whatsoever is to be included. (Who are all these agents that I see people talking about in newsgroups and forums that ask for three chapters, or five page outlines, or what have you? They aren't on *my* list.)

So I'm back to working and reworking the letter, hoping I can figure out how to describe my story in a way that actually manages to interest someone. I find myself writing:
“Certain he is not a hero, and terrified of becoming a villain, Asond is saved from the fate of becoming a tragic figure by his amusingly reprehensible habit of pointing everyone's flaws — including his own — in the snarkiest and most sarcastic way possible.”

I read this to my 15-year-old son (one of only three people beside myself in the whole wide world who has actually read this story all the way through) and ask “What do you think?”

“Well, mom, that's very… accurate.”
“But is it appealing?”
“No, but it's very accurate.”

Submission Nerves

I have just sent Talking With Winds out again. I now need to convince myself to write some agent queries.

I have spent the last hour writing and rewriting this post trying to come up with something to say that would then convince me to go write the agent queries. Bah! To not write them, is to give up on the possibility of snagging an agent before actually selling a book. I hate eliminating possibilities without very good reason. Cynicism is not a good reason. I will go do the queries.

Author's Note on Racciman's World

I'm going to blame it all on a guy named Tracy Hickman. He was at my first ever science fiction convention, and he did a panel on worldbuilding. I was a dedicated worldbuilder already, but my worlds had always been built alongside of the story that I was telling in them. Before Tracy explained how he approached worldbuilding, it had never occurd to me to build the world first, and find stories to tell in it afterward. So I thought I'd give it a try.

But what to base the world on? Well, they say 'write what you know', and as one of eight siblings, (and later the mother of six,) one of the things I knew was large family dynamics. So I decided to base a fantasy world on that. What would happen, I asked myself, if the gods of a fantasy world, were actually children? A family of children, with all their squabbles and shifting alliegences reflected in the world they created?

Keywords: Fantasy, Racciman, secondary world,


 
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