In COLD WELCOME, chapter 37, Grace, MacRobert, etc. are flying west from Port Major across the continent to a city on the west coast where they will meet Stella coming in from off-planet. I do not have the final version of this book on the computer; it has them flying to Portmentor. I also have Read More…
Category: Vatta
Are Horses Off-Topic? Not Really
Most regular visitors here know I am a horse lover, longtime rider, and occasional horse owner, with a list of horse-related injuries to prove some level of inexpert experience. I have fallen off horses over fences, been spun off, bucked off (both western & English tack), and have had broken bones and concussions. Still, the Read More…
NewBook in the Home Stretch (I hope!) And Soup.
NewBook shed several thousand words when I pulled out the stuff that was on the wrong track, and the stuff that didn’t belong in this book at all. There may be more fossils to be removed but…several thousand new words have come along and are about to make connections that flow back through the other Read More…
And then what?
The most important question for a storyteller is the one asked by anxious readers who are glued to the story…”And then what happened?” In any of its variant forms, this question means that so far the story is functioning as it should. The glue itself varies with the reader…I remember books praised by other kids, Read More…
NewBook Still Going…
I know I’ve said this before, but here it is again: every writer finds a process that works for *that writer*. Then writers try to describe their processes to normal humans who don’t write, and use metaphors and analogies and make funny faces and gesture with their hands, and say “It’s like….” a lot. And Read More…
Words, Words, and Word Software
My traditional lament for the demise of Word*Star and spot of loathing for MS Word: o waily woe (lament) and grrrr (spot of loathing.) Word*Star did not lose files or parts of files unless you made a really stupid mistake with a dot command. Which I did, once. (Once was enough! That whole unversal action Read More…
NewBook Charges On
80,000 words on May 13. There’ve been some “blank” days on which other stuff happened, and of course lots of other stuff is happening to everybody everywhere. But NewBook is well past any concern about “Will it gel into a book?” It’s definitely going to make a book, though “But will it be a GOOD Read More…
On the Scent: Tally-ho
New Book changed gears this week, as I said a couple of times. From a story that, on March 24, was still wandering about, not giving me much sense of where it was headed, just over 51,000 words, and took another five days to reach 52,500 by the end of the day March 29, it Read More…
Busy With Nothing (Not)
The number of balls in the air varies from day to day. Basic maintenance (at which I’m not as good as some people) always includes some cooking, some barn chores, some “land” chores, some business chores (email, mail, etc.) and some writing. Of the writing some is work on the book, some is work about Read More…
Where are we, again?
NewBook is over 51,000 words now. We had sunshine (bright, unclouded sunshine) nearly all day today and the solar panels produced just a hair under 40 Kwh. We are still healthy. For supper we had many-bean and ham soup, from the freezer. (I make bean soup a couple of times a winter and freeze whatever Read More…