a blessing of monsters

Rental car acquired

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In a few hours my son and I will be taking off for Surrey and the Pokemon Regionals there. I won’t be dropping by bookstores or meeting folks: this trip is about my son and his fun. I do plan to work on my book while my son plays.

Anyway, progress on A BLESSING OF MONSTERS has been tough lately… right up until yesterday, when I had a great day. Protip: It’s hard to be motivated to write when you know every word is just going to be cut in the second draft. Yesterday I reached a part I knew I would keep, and things magically became easier.

With luck I’ll have time to write a bit later so I won’t lose the whole day. But tomorrow should be better.

Hello, BoingBoing readers

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Yesterday, two and a half years after it came out, Child of Fire got a great review from BoingBoing.

And, because my luck is so very perfect, the Kindle store has gone down–apparently because of a database error–so the link from the review takes you to the physical book. No worries, though! I’m sure they’ll have it back up again in no time (grumbles). I’ve heard rumors that there are other places to buy ebooks, but who can tell whether that’s true or not?

The series runs to four books, which you can see over there on the right hand side of my blog. It’s also been cancelled. If you’re curious, I blogged about the reasons why it ended. You can also go to my home page to see the fantastic book trailer made by the guys at Wyrd.

Currently I have a new series in the works I’m about to send to my agent, an epic fantasy about two people caught up in the sudden collapse of an empire. Check out my Upcoming Books page for more info about that.

And welcome.

In which I make progress

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I got to spend some time with A Blessing of Monsters today. I wrote about 1200 words, then wrote 100 anti-words. I wanted to do more at the end of the day but the scene I was working on had gone all wrong and my kid wouldn’t give me the space to think about it.

At some point in the day I even came up with a decentish title, but I didn’t write it down and now I’ve forgotten it. Ah well. It was probably brilliant.

Anyway, it felt good to take hold of the book again, even it wasn’t a firm hold. We’ll see what comes tomorrow.

Ray Lilly vs Tyrion Lannister

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Yesterday I wrote and turned in the Suvudu.com Cage Match between Tyrion and Ray, and I think you guys will be a little surprised at what I did with it. It was long, though.

Anyway, to my surprise it took me all day. I gave up one of my prime writing days for it, a day when I’m supposed to be finishing 2K words on A Blessing Of Monsters, so that’s bad.

And after this next cage match wraps up, I’m going to be turning off comments on the blog globally. The spam is just wasting my time and having my time wasted drives me crazy.

This blog post will not change your life.

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Ever since I returned home from dealing with my father-in-law’s death my WIP, A Blessing of Monsters, has been sorta stalled out. I’ve been making progress, but it’s been slow going, not nearly as steady as December and January.

Today I’ll be powering up Mac Freedom and going offline for most of the day. I just discovered a plot hole in the story (stupid magic spells) and I can’t just make a note to myself and go back to it later. The change means the relationships between all the characters have to change, and those relationships are what the book is about. So, vomit draft revision, which I hate but end up doing every time.

Not only has my writing been struggling, but the funeral caused a long delay in replacing my son’s eyeglasses. Folks might remember the end of last year when I put Lord of Reavers on sale through my site to help offset the costs. Thank you, everyone who bought a copy; I hope you enjoyed the story. With luck, he’ll have settled on a pair of frames he likes and I can post a pic by the end of the month.

I also have to do that Seattle thing where I wear shorts and an ugly sweater when I go for my walk. The landlord hasn’t gotten the washing machine fixed, and we’re coming up on… what? two weeks since we got back? I’m sure there’s a law stating when a washing machine has to be replaced or whatever, but I’d rather wait for a repair. Whenever we get something new around here, it’s the cheapest possible thing and doesn’t work well. Or it’s smaller. Or it’s just generally not good.

So we’re just looking at laundromats and laundry services, and I’m out of long pants to wear.

Finally, the Cage Match between Ray Lilly and Anasûrimbor Kellhus ends today at 5pm EST. I’ll be offline most of the day and will probably not see the numbers until after it’s over. It would be nice to see Ray vs. Tyrion, but if not I’ll be glad to work on my new book this weekend instead. And I’m glad the comment section has settled down and gotten less nasty.

But if Ray wins, I’ll bring in Annalise for round 2, and I’ll make the writeup lighter in tone.

And now I’m out of here. Hope you guys have a great day.

Two blog posts in one day??

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Unthinkable!!

Actually, I had no plans at all to write in my blog again, but fate intervened. Today was supposed to be a “large goal” day, but instead I hit the small goal only.

To explain: I try to do about a thousand words a day as my small goal, but on days like today, when I have no other commitments during the morning and afternoon, I slip out of the house as early as possible and try to do twice my usual goal. At least. This helps make up for the days when I typically can’t write at all.

However, today I was hit with a really bad histamine reaction. To what, I don’t know, but the itching was really bad and it slowly spread down my arms and then down to my knees.

This happens every once in a while, but we’ve been unable to find the trigger. It wasn’t clothes, it probably wasn’t food, and…

Really, what it seemed related to was sweat. I had started to move my body a bit, and the sweat on my torso started itching. From there it got worse and worse.

At one point I had my wife take a picture with the idea of posting it, but it was… er… too much. I didn’t want to gross anyone out.

My skin has mostly settled down now (thanks, Benadryl!), but it’s past time for me to take another long walk. I’m hoping I can make it home without peeling my own skin off.

Trying to get back into the swing

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As I mentioned in my post last night, the last few weeks have been devoted to dealing with a death in the family.

Today, for the first time in weeks, I dug back into my new novel. I really wanted to do over 2K words but that wasn’t happening. Too much time away from the project, too much thinking about how long it was going to be and how much detail I should include. In fact, too much thinking about everything except character and story.

No wonder it was like pulling teeth. Tomorrow is Pokemon League, so I will have more time to do my thing. At least I surpassed my goal.

Lots of bills to pay, paperwork to handle, packages to put away, and art to store. Just because I’m back in Seattle and squeezing time for my writing doesn’t mean that the work is behind me. In fact, it’s going to be harder now, because all these tasks will have to be piled on top of what we already have to do, and my wife is going to be feeling pretty fragile about this for a long time.

On top of that, I put all my calorie tracking and such on hold while I was in Rochester. Continue reading

Writing and productivity

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Holy crap, you guys. Yesterday I wrote over 3500 words yesterday. I am never that productive. Never.

Long time readers know I’ve been working on my productivity for years. I used to write two pages a day and crap out. I thought I could never do more.

Well, blah blah blah, I’ve been trying to do better, and it’s working out. I’m not writing faster because I’m writing sloppier; it’s because I’m changing the way I work so I can focus more.

You know what else helped? This:

Guest Post: How I Went From Writing 2,000 Words a Day to 10,000 Words a Day.

I’m not doing exactly what this author is doing: I don’t write out the upcoming plot points on a legal pad, I type them into the end the actual file and delete them as I go through. I also don’t have a spreadsheet, mainly because: spreadsheet. However, I am finding that, the more quickly I work, the happier I am with the sentences I put down. There are fewer word echoes, at least.

Anyway, I’m off to do today’s pages and if history is any judge, today is going to be incredibly difficult.

I just don’t feel like leaving my apartment today.

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Nothing else to add to that. My wife and son come home from their east coast trip this evening (they’re in JFK as I write this) and the place is all cleaned up.

But I’m sick of going to the same Starbucks all the time. I’m going to break out my standing desk and try to do my work at home. Usually that doesn’t work, but the hummingbirds are out and I’m bored with the usual walk.

Also, back in my post about the end of the Twenty Palaces series, I said that A Blessing of Monsters would be complete in one volume. Turns out that’s not going to happen. It’s just spinning further and further out.

Logging off to work.

Ten Days

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I’ve just put Lord of Reavers up for sale on B&N and Amazon. It’ll be a while before it’s cleared for sale there, but in the meantime you can still buy it directly from me.

Also, my wife and son are out of town for ten days to visit her family. I’m at home, and I’ve borrowed a number of DVDs from the library; they aren’t great movies, but they’re for grownups, and if you have an account on LiveJournal (they’re free), you can vote for which ones I’ll watch.

In the meantime, here’s my plan for the next week and a half:

1- To bed every night before midnight. Before 11 would be better but lets be realistic.

2- Vegetables every day.

3- Get back on the Livestrong calorie counting, which I set aside during the holiday.

4- A helluva lot of walking

5- Personal hygiene, apartment hygiene.

6- Set Freedom for six hours every night before bed.

7- 2500 words a day at least.

It will take focus, but this is going to be a productive holiday season.