Yes, I’m Better

Progress continues: some more stitches have come out (not all yet) , the nose-scab is down to a snarky-looking dot, energy level is coming right back up, and I’ll be looking for a new bifocal prescription pretty soon, when the final soreness is gone. Yes, the new computer system Kate came to install is nearing Read More…

Getting Back in Shape

Not me personally, but my office…following the Great Computer Crash and the I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Covid Scare and the Attack of the Gravity Monster (still healing from that last one), and with the help of the amazing Kate Shull, I am now in possession of the Boxes of Delight.  Two new computers (one for me, one for husband, Read More…

Left Behind: Doomed?

No, this isn’t about a particular belief of a particular group of Christians.  It’s about stories.  Stories that start with someone left behind–oversleeping and missing the boat, the train, the shopping trip, perhaps.   Shipwrecked on an island.   Falling  out of an airplane into a dense forest.   Or missed by the rescue vessel when others Read More…

Agent Response

Great relief of writer to find that yes, the whole package is back…my agent called Friday and we had a good long talk.  The book IS a book.  It is a reasonably good book.  It could use some work, but he enjoyed it, stayed up late to read it.  Also, all the things he talked Read More…

And the Beat Goes On

The final buffing and polishing (final is an indefinite word since there’s always One More Tyop to find) is now done.   So yesterday morning, bright and early, Book II poked its head up out of the debris left over from Book I and said “So let’s get started.”  And I said “I need to clean Read More…

Done-de-done-done

NewBook is done.   Three rounds of revision, wrestled to the mat on space, time, person, place, etc. issues.  From here on out it’s nitpicking time because it’s DONE. 172,125 words, counting chapter titles, datelines (actually places, mostly), 31 chapters (may need some chapters numbered differently, that’s an editorial decision I’d take advice on.) It’s a Read More…

Stage Three Revision

Stage Three overlaps Stage Two, because–especially this time–there’s no reason to ignore 3rd level problems while reading aloud to someone from the computer screen (there is no print-out yet.)    So if I find an entire paragraph that’s now redundant (a Stage Two problem) I just delete it,  or a temporal-sequence problem,  I mark that section Read More…

Closer and Closer…

Progress is still coming and the book is still GROWING.  I didn’t ask it to grow past 150K, I swear.  But it swore back that I need another chapter of this, and two more chapters of that, and by the way I’d left an entire Very Important POV dangling. So.  Still growing.   New Stuff is Read More…

Second Revision Draft

Second revision draft is now on chapter 22.   This book, thanks to the years of not writing and brain foggy stuff, may take more than one run through the “Construction Phase” to get things right, but every thing so far is willing to be nudged in the right direction.  My metaphors for the problems are Read More…

156,300+ Is Not The End

It is, however,  *this* end.   The last day in which what I’m doing could be called “first draft* rather than *revision*.    Somewhere between three and four in the morning, I finally got my heroes out of the low passage out into the air and light–battered, filthy, stinking, exhausted beyond exhaustion, half their original companions dead, Read More…