I can not understand why the characters in this book insist on chatting so much. Can’t we just jump straight to the violence? Please?
Also, I can not make the links on the right sidebar (on my blog, for those reading this on LiveJournal) rearrange themselves into the order I want.
I attribute both problems to a sleepless night and really awful dreams.
And my wordcount on Man Bites World is currently lower than when I started. ::sigh::
In happier news, my email was correctly backed up, and I haven’t lost any of it. Yay!
Also, my website needs many changes. Many. Good thing I have so much free time. X___X
Finished today’s work and yesterday’s, too. The book wants to be written now, and is helping me push it along.
I also “finished” some promotional stuff Del Rey asked me to do for Child of Fire, for certain values of “finished” that involve another read-through to polish it up.
I was supposed to also work on Cool Thing That Would Be Awesome If It Worked Out, but time has already left, and so must I.
New ending… plotted!
There are still some blank spaces to fill in, but I just finished reworking a whole new ending for Man Bites World.
Take that, book that doesn’t want to be written!
There are few plot problems that can’t be solved by asking Who are these characters and what do they want?
After a productive week, I’ve hit another wall with the plot. There are so many threads to tie up, and now that the book is 70K+ I should be wrapping all of them up.
But I need a long walk to think about the best way to tie up all the threads.
Of course, in the old, pre-contract days, I would have just put it aside for a month or two while I wrote short fiction. That’s not a viable option now.
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.
Rather than struggle with Man Bites World for a moment, I’m going to post some links.
1) The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads of all Time. Some of these have been circulating for a while, but there’s some all new, all disturbing images there. Via eeknight.
2) Bamboo Bikes from Zambia. Too cool.
3) Ten Ways to Take a Bad Author Photo. Pretty funny. I used my author photo on the front of my Facebook page.
4) The only part of the NY Times Book Review section I read religiously is the Crime Section, but there’s something about Marilyn Stasio’s style that annoys me to no end.
Shit. I went to the Starbucks across the street from day job, sat down with my laptop and coffee, and promptly spilled the whole thing over the table. Spirit Gate by Kate Elliott is soaked through and my computer kept flashing to a white screen.
I say again: Shit.
Now I’m sitting at my desk at the day job, with computer and book resting on the air conditioning vent beside me, drying out. ::fingers crossed:: Instead, I guess I’ll work on some of the publicity stuff I’m supposed to whip up by the end of the month, and thinkerate on the characters and plot.
I just did slightly more than three thousand words on Man Bites World. I know some writers do that every day, but I have never written so many words of prose in one day. That’s huge for me.
Book, you are annoying. Like golf. Like jigsaw puzzles. You are frustrating and impossible for days and days, and then suddenly you give a short term accomplishment. This is great! I think. And fun, too! I need to do this all the time!
But I know your sneaky ways. Tomorrow, you’re just as likely to be impossible again.
::shakes fist at laptop::
(They were good pages, too. I’m happy with them.)