i look bad

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.

I was planning to post about the 2008 bestseller list

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But hey, something else came up. What was it, you ask?

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Why, it’s the advanced reader’s editions of my book!

Holy crap! I am holding my first book in my hand and I am walking on air. When I took them out of the envelope, I was stunned to see that they had covers on them. I don’t know why I assumed they’d have plain covers like those stacks of books I saw that time at The Strand, but I just stared and stared at it.

And I thought Christ! It’s huge!

I seriously thought it was the biggest mass market paperback I’d ever seen, and I had to compare it to the books on my shelf to convince myself it was the normal size.

Oh, hey! Wanna see the whole cover?

Child of Fire All Cover

It’s a little hard to read that text, but if you want to read the back cover text, check out this larger version of the file. It’s three copies of the book photocopied together, but I’m not tearing one apart for my blog. At that link you can see the blurbs from Jim Butcher, Terry Rossio and Sherwood Smith, and the back cover copy, too.

And now I’m going to bed. I have a scene to revise tomorrow, and suddenly it doesn’t feel daunting at all.

:-)

We learn more from failure than success

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That ten-day fast I was on? It turned out to be a one and a half day fast. Excuse-making, rationalizations and other specious pseudo-arguments will be made later. Meanwhile… Look! People who are crazy about cats!

Writing and my everyday life

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First, a link: Donald Maas’s The Career Novelist is now available as a free download. I’ve only skimmed it so far, but it looks pretty interesting, despite being from 1996.

Second, my editor asked me to hold off working on Man Bites World until we can straighten out the proposal. She has some concerns with it. Which is fair and, you know, that’s why she reads the proposal. She wants to make sure that the fantasy thriller I’m supposed to write isn’t going to be a daring homage to my two favorite movies, PORKY’S 2 and THE BICYCLE THIEF.*

But I worked on it anyway. It was just a few hundred words, but I couldn’t leave it alone.

And, because I’m not trying to meet a daily or weekly goal at the moment, I took some time to finish the book I’m reading. After three or four false starts, I dug into Murder Among Children by Tucker Coe (a pseudonym for Donald Westlake). It’s a mystery novel written in the mid-sixties, with all the racial and gender issues that implies, but the writing was appealingly bleak and the protagonist engaging. I’m tempted to dig up the rest of the books (I know there are only five, with a personal closure of sorts) to see if and how he deals with his personal demons.

And now I have to sign off, do some research here at the library (my wife found some green mold growing on the wall behind a piece of furniture, and I need to research the best way to deal with it. Seattle, you annoy me.) and then hit a couple of stores. I need to buy a couple of things for the Superbowl/Puppybowl party my son and I will have tomorrow, but not so much that I leave a bunch of food lying around the place.

See, on the Monday after the game, my wife and I will be doing a fast. It’s not one of those crazy lemon juice and cayenne fasts I used to do (she hates those); it’s this thing with specific foods you’re supposed to eat and so on. Anyway, I don’t do these to lose weight (although that happens). I do them because it’s a stark way to look at the way I eat and my emotional connections to food. The first fast I ever did was a revelation, and I’m curious to see what insights I’ll get this time.

I plan to write about it over the next week and a half, though, so be ready to skim if that sort of thing doesn’t interest you.

Off to the reference shelves. Hope you guys are having a nice day.

* Quick note: I haven’t actually seen either of these movies.

Eight quick notes

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One: my back is much better than it has been the last few days. I’m at the day job, I can move around pretty well, and I’m mostly sitting without pain. Yay for healing.

Two: So much for the rowing machine. I’ve been planning to take the rowing machine out of the back room into the living room (which is the only space big enough for it) but we just don’t have room. Salad Eater has pushed the TV in front of the fireplace and set up her easel, which makes me wildly happy even if she only gets to paint once a week, maybe twice. But there’s no room for the rowing machine out there; I have to let that plan go and do something else for my health. Thanks for the reminder, back pain. Better you than a heart attack or letter from my doctor about diabetes.

Three: Once or twice a week isn’t really enough for her. Once some other crap gets taken care of, we’ll figure ways for her to get more painting time.

Four: Still haven’t heard back about my proposal for Man Bites World and I haven’t gotten my notes for Everyone Loves Blue Dog. For a while, I stressed about this stuff, but at this point I’m going to shrug it off and write book three. It’ll come when it comes.

Five: Last night we made Alton Brown’s ginger ale recipe. It should be ready for tasting Saturday night. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

Six: You know how the economy slows down during a recession? It’s the same for doctors offices, too. The phones have been pretty slow–I guess people have been putting off their routine care.

Seven: On Tuesday, David Frum was on NPR (I know, I know, I forgot to post this earlier. Gimme a break!) to talk about Obama’s economic plan, the recession, and how conservatives can win back the majority in congress. His suggestion for regaining political power? Conservatives need to appeal to working class Americans again, and stop ignoring the wage stagnation of the past decade. His suggested fixes? Anti-immigration and deregulating health care Yeah, he wanted to deregulate. He said government over-regulation had made it impossible for a Sam Walton to create a nation-wide Wal-Mart of affordable health care.

These people are shameless. Worse, this sound bite of his was supposed to appeal to the working class, even though it’s the same old, same old. I guess it’s all about the marketing.

Eight: I’m reading one of Donald Westlake’s “Samuel Holt” novels, but mostly out of a sense of inertia. I’m in one of my book grouch phases; nothing satisfies me and nothing is interesting.

Five things make a post

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1) My back is still painful, but I expect to be able to go back to the day job tomorrow. Heating pads, ice, and body work have me doing pretty well. Although I still wouldn’t try to climb a ladder.

2) On the web, James Enge takes the latest episode of Criminal Minds out to the woodshed. Don’t miss that one.

3) Elseweb, Agent Barbara Poelle posts five story ideas she wish someone would submit. Obviously, I’m not going to be working on any of these–I have an agent already and a contract, too–but it’s interesting to see what people want. Her list is nothing like mine would be–in fact, number 2 sounds like it would be appalling. Still, it’s pretty interesting to see how people think about they books they’re looking for and how they frame their interest.

4) and 5) While I was trapped at home on the couch, I had a chance to watch two of the movies I borrowed recently from the library: WANTED and HANCOCK. Weirdly, one was adapted from a comic book and one was about a superhero, and they weren’t the same movie.

Now here’s a chance to see if my WordPress plugin can put in the LJ cut. Spoilers!

WANTED was actually the stronger of the two movies, as sad as that seems. It was based on a comic book of the same name, which I’ve read in trade paperback. From what I’ve heard, producers bought the rights to the story after the very first issue, which ended with the scene where the shlub shoots the wings off a fly. In the comic, the next story beat was that the protagonist learned he was the son of a supervillain in a world where the villains has defeated the superheroes years before, and now ran everything in secret. He came into his powers, embraced evil and consolidated his power through a whole lot of killing.

In the film, his father was a superhuman assassin from one of those millennia-old assassins guild that movies seem so full of. Our Hero learns to use his powers and hunts the dude who killed his father.

It was mostly an excuse for ridiculously over the top action scenes, which are decidedly out of style now. And it was kinda fun. I just wish they’d left out the fat snark.

HANCOCK is the superhero movie that came from a spec script titled TONIGHT, HE COMES, which I haven’t read but have heard is amazing and wonderful. So wonderful, in fact, that it had to be made, and had all the misery and desperation drained out of it.

Really, as soon as Charlize Theron turned out to have superpowers, too, the whole thing comes apart. It’s like the scene in DEJA VU where the protagonist climbs into the time machine–the reality of the story came apart and stopped making sense.

Disappointing, both of them.

The not-fun day

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I overslept this morning and missed my writing time. I’ll have to make it up tonight. Also, I’m at the day job. Also, I tweaked my back last night and now I’m walking around the office like igor.

Don’t expect much from me today, thanks.