everyone loves blue dog

Game of Cages, Man Bites World, Child of Fire

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Today’s a triple book day–the copyedit for Game of Cages arrived late last night (so late that I didn’t find it until this morning), I’m hoping to write the last two scenes of Man Bites World today and then there’s the signing for Child of Fire later this morning.

Busy day. You know what worries me most? My wife and son haven’t been sleeping all that well. Will they have the reserves for two hours at the store and socializing after? dum dum DUMMM!

After that, I’m concerned about having the copyedit back to Del Rey in only ten days. Have I mentioned that I’m a poky reader? I do believe I have.

Btw, for folks reading this on LiveJournal, I’m still at skip=90 or something, and it’s been hard to find the time to catch up. Sorry.

To work.

New title!

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Isn’t that a fun, clever and original subject line?  I’m sure you’re all envious of my wit. 

Everyone Loves Blue Dog has a new name.  Not a new tag, because I don’t change tags.  I never change a project’s filename, either; that’s a lesson I learned the hard way. 

The new title is Game of Cages. 

I like it (I came up with it–ahem) and the sales department didn’t roll their eyes or bark out laughter when my editor presented it to them.  If you reacted that way, let me know.  Seriously.  But this means that Man Bites World is going to need a [Noun] of [Noun] title.  ::sigh::

In happy news, I’ve had a productive couple of days.  And I think I figured out the very end of the book.  Now I just have to work out how to get there.

Good (but embarrassing) news

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I just received a two-month deadline extension for Man Bites World.  Frankly, I’m embarrassed that I need it and more than a little frustrated with my method of working.  For the last few weeks, I’ve had a powerful case of Other writers can do this, why can’t I? That’s still going on, but without the worry of missing a deadline.

Well, I did spend over two months of this year on revisions to the soon-to-be-retitled Everyone Loves Blue Dog.  My agent warned me to factor that in when calculating deadlines, but I had no idea I’d be stuck on it again for over two months!

At any rate, I head to SoCal in two weeks to Comic-Con and see friends–while there, I plan to steal extra time for book three.  Hopefully it will not only be finished, but good, too.  Hopefully part 2, I will never have to ask for this again.

Items of (dubious) interest

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From a former book publicist: What should air on C-SPAN’s “Book TV” this weekend. Well, I thought it was funny.

Twenty Best Cthulhu Tales–I’ve only read a fraction of the stories on this list, but I’m copying it here so I can reference it later. Mythos! I love it.

Man writes book that will take a thousand years to read. Embarrassingly, after 750 years, readers will discover that he used “it’s” when he should have written “its.”

This next one is off the (accidental) book theme of this post, but I do hope you’ll all read it: Urban Farmer finds success. So cool.

As for items of a non-linking variety: Tomorrow I get one of my birthday gifts–reading time. Just like Father’s Day, I’m going to spend a significant amount of time sacked out in bed with a book. I still have Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott on deck, and I hope to make a sizable dent in it.

Also, I’m told that Child of Fire will have the opening chapter of book 2 at the very back. Now, this is cool news, but I should come right out and say that I never read preview excerpts in books.  Invariably, I buy the excerpted book, put it on my shelf for a couple months (or years) and when I finally start it, I get a disturbing reader’s deja vu.  “Have I read this already?”  Since I’m terrible with titles, I can never be sure. 

Eventually, I just swore off the practice. 

And book 2, Everyone Loves Blue Dog, will soon have a new title.  There’s a current front runner, but I don’t want to talk about it until things are settled.  The happiest part for me is that I like this title and it doesn’t turn up in a Google search. 

With that, I’ll sign off to enjoy the holiday.

Phew

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I met my goal for the day, which makes three days in a row. Jeez, this is almost like a job. And since I had some extra time, I took care of the three little revisions my editor asked for in Everyone Loves Blue Dog. And that’s where the crazy came in.

I know the book is going straight to the copy editor, and I was paralyzed by the knowledge that I wasn’t going to get a chance to revise it. I mean, I was inexplicably freaked out by it.

Still, it’s done (once again!) and sent off. Next for … Blue Dog will be the copy edit in a few months. Next for Man Bites World is another morning trying to hit my goal before my wife goes to work, which will be tomorrow.

I have twenty minutes to check out my library materials and hit the farmer’s market for some beefsteak tomatoes. Enjoy your day.

My last post was “This is tough” but this will be tougher

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Today I worked on Man Bites World for a little more than an hour before my day job began. On those days, my daily goal is 500 words–just enough to feel I accomplished something in a limited time. On bad days I can feel okay about barely making it; on good days I can double it (or almost double it) and feel pretty good.

Today I wrote 200 words.

There’s no excuse for it. Yesterday was even worse–near as I can tell, I wrote negative one words.

Last night, though, I sat and talked quite a bit with my wife. I’ve been avoiding the Starbucks near my home because some of the other customers are too close and too gross, but working at home isn’t cutting it. Even when I’m out, though, or at a different coffee shop, I’m daydreaming, distracted and generally zoned.

Not that this is new. I’m *always* daydreaming, but I need to get my head clear and focus my daydreaming on the characters.

My wife thinks its a lack of sleep, customary depression following the end (hah!) of … Blue Dog and some overly self-indulgent calorie consumption. She’s right, too. But the only cure I know of is to brow-beat myself into looking at the laptop and only the laptop.

It had better work, too.

Pop the cork on the champa–zzzzzzzz

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I just received confirmation from my editor that she received the (probably) final revision to Everyone Loves Blue Dog. Of course she’ll have to read it again to be sure it all works, but I should have the next couple months clear to tear into Man Bites World.

Yay!

Unfortunately, I have about 60,000 words to write before the end of July. That’s not impossible, but it does push at my limits, especially since I’ll also need to revise in that time (I always need to revise). We’ll see. Also, I’m tired. Have I mentioned lately that I’m tired? I say that all the time? Really? Well, it’s true.

And I got to meet Charles Stross last night at the Pike Place Brewery. Nice guy. Too bad I had a socialization fail. Ah, well.

Bad day

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Yesterday was a bad day, despite a bunch of good things happening.

It started with me at work on … Blue Dog (still). I had hopes of wrapping it up, but I was working very carefully over a sequence of pages that haven’t been as strong as it could be. Okay. I guess I’ve become a little obsessive about it, but I really want to do this right so I can be done with it. Probably I’m giving it too much time, but if it makes the book better…?

But that wasn’t what messed up my day.

Late in the morning, I had a conversation with the assoc. copy chief at Del Rey about last minute questions about the galleys for Child of Fire (Amazon.com or Indiebound.org).

No problem! I thought. I’d scanned all the galley pages I’d marked up before I sent them back, just in case. How clever I felt! Nevermind that my corrections must have been unclear somehow. I was ready.

Except, not. The questions weren’t about the notations I’d made on the galley. They were additional mistakes caught by the proofreader.

God, this stuff is mortifying. How many times have I read this damn book? Shouldn’t I have noticed the phrase “in the front” appearing in back-to-back sentences? Shouldn’t I have noticed that a character does not need to walk up to a door twice? Shouldn’t I remember that a very important item is not in the character’s pocket because not fifteen pages before he was grinding his teeth in frustration that another character was keeping it from him?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful for every note. Improvement is improvement, and I want the book to be as good as possible. But I feel honestly ashamed that I never noticed these problems myself.

Luckily (for you guys), immediately after the call my wife and I ran out the door for a very nice lunch with an old friend I don’t see as often as I should. When my son got home from school later, we had a great time together. All of that gave me time and perspective to truly absorb the copy chief’s wrap up to our conversation: “This is a perfectly normal list of corrections we’re talking about. I’ve worked on books with many worse than this.”

So, yeah. I was too busy to post this yesterday, which means you get this lesser degree of whining. And I have it in perspective now, and I’m ready to finally finally kill off this second book.

Still humiliating, though.

Pizza tonight

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My son’s school is having a benefit pizza party tonight. Mom and boy are already there, hanging out at Volunteer Park or the library nearby, and I’ll be catching a bus over there later to join them. It sucks that they have to kill three hours between the end of school and the start of the party, but it didn’t make much sense to have him ride home on the school bus for an hour, demand food at home, then take a Metro bus in the other direction.

As for me, I’m making progress on Everyone Loves Blue Dog, but I can’t shake the feeling that I should have finished by now. I really really want this thing to be in my rear view mirror. Man Bites World is sitting fallow while I tinker and trim, and I am itching to get back to it. … Blue Dog is solved. It’s done. At this point, I’m just managing the reader’s experience, which is important (very important, I know) but it isn’t interesting.

Also, I’m tired. Tired enough to feel kinda sick. If we owned cell phones, I’d call my wife and beg off.

Yesterday

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Here’s a quick tally of yesterday’s strangeness (not all of it bad):

Woke early. Worked on …Blue Dog for a while, then rushed home.

Went out just after lunch to see BATTLE FOR TERRA. My son nearly fell asleep on the bus.

We all stopped in at a comics shop for Free Comics Day. The first comics we saw were very, very adult. We had to make our way to the back to pick up books the boy wanted.

At the movie theater, I had to take the elevator. This particular shopping center (Pacific Place) is four stories with a wide open mezzanine structure. The escalators trigger my fear of heights, and for some reason I was extremely vulnerable yesterday.

Loved the movie. See previous post.

At the boy’s insistence, we sat down to eat at Johnnie Rockets, which was even worse than I remembered. The meal was interrupted partway through by an PA announcement that they were evacuating the building.. I stayed behind to settle the bill, then met my wife and son outside. So much for visiting the bookstore in the basement.

On the bus ride home, I noticed something strange just before we came to our stop. A woman was standing by the door to her townhouse, pushing a man away. She would then turn to unlock her door, and he came up close to her again. She appeared to be fending him off.

My wife said “That didn’t look good.” We all got off the bus and I immediately went over there, but they had both gone inside. When I turned around, I saw that my wife had flagged down a police car. We explained what we saw, and he promised to look into it.

Was she about to be raped? Why was the building evacuated? I don’t think we’re ever going to find out.