tcastleb

I think the book's done.

I say "think," because I put the end on it, and I'm satisfied with it, but there's a few nagging, nitpicky things that I need to go back and fix. Still, for all intents and purposes, this draft of Orossy is finished. Hooray for that!

Still have to go through and put chapters in it. I went through the hardcopy I have last night at work and wrote in where the chapters should go so it should go fairly quick. There's approximately fifty-four chapters. 151,000 words. And some more of going through notes in the hardcopy and seeing what I can cram in there before I go to residency and print it out for my mentors. I also got some of those giant bubble wrap envelops so they can mail it back to me. :>)

And then, hopefully, I can set it aside for a while and work on some other stuff.

And may this be the last complete rewrite. Four is enough, thank you, and the darn thing keeps getting longer every time.

In other news, I'm ecstatic to see that otterdance, aka Lynn Flewelling, is coming to Comic-Con. Yaaaay!

Clarion here starts in a week, and I get to go meet with all the folks for that next Tuesday night. Yaaay!

Laundry: check. Packing: almost. Dishes: done. Trash: TBD Cat boxes: TBD Airport shuttle reservation: made. Boarding passes: printed. SHU critiques: taken care of. Lizard edits: started. Food: good idea.

My brain is tired. Worked from 6:30am to 9:30pm for both jobs (and I'm counting the drive time, since finding parking was a pain at the store.) Funny that retail is actually a relief to do and less stressful than the hotel sit-on-my-butt-and-do-almost-nothing job. Mostly because the store job is some 85% tourists, and they're generally in a good mood, and if they're not, they don't hang around to give us trouble. I do like the store. Nice people to work with, fun stuff to sell and a nice environment.

Printed out the updated first 3/5's of the novel. Still finding a few plot snags, and still having trouble trying to figure out Orossy's angle. It'll get there . . .

I should go write . . . but it's late and I think my brain is fried for the day, and maybe I'll just go watch a movie . . .

I didn't make it to the zoo today, since I spent most of the day trying to finish my submission for the deadline on Friday. It's almost done, some 110 pages (la la la, thank goodness for a VERY generous mentor) but I'm not entirely happy with it . . . as I said before, it's the middle, and the flow and Orossy's motivation is a bit screwed up, so I'm hoping Mentor will be able to find the things I know are there but I don't know how to fix.

And then it's just, um, some 180 pages left to fix up and finish. I can do that in a month, right?

I still don't know what to send for the SHU residency workshop. -sigh- Guess I'll worry about it after Friday.

Fitz's new name is "No, dammit cat!" As in, "No, dammit cat, stop chewing on my computer cord! Ow! That hurts! No chewing on my arm! Or my foot! Or my thumb!" And my DVD's are currently scattered across the floor because every time I put them back, he has to go crawl back into the entertainment center and knock them out again. The joys of kittenhood. Not.

The new job is going good. It's fun. Except I could really use another day totally off from either job this week. Oh well.

Here's one of my favorite pics from last week, so I have at least one zoo pic in.



Anyway. Back to trying to get these last few scenes taken care of . . .

Worked on the deer story today just because it was nice to be able to write new stuff and not fret about little tweaks I need to do on the old stuff for Orossy.

Go check out this blog post by YA author Maureen Johnson, who got one of her books banned for a dumb reason. I got the link from blackholly, but you should go read the blog post by the author over here She's a very funny and witty lady, and has a lot of other good writing posts too. Go read even if you don't write YA.

And check this out. Did you know highways could melt?

I mean, it's not funny at all for the commuters, but, I've been staring at the pictures all afternoon, just dumbfounded.

And, just because this is a weird, random post anyway, have a wombat.

Played with the layout of my journal . . . and now I have "The Tiki Room" stuck in my head.

Orossy is trucking along. I'm about over the hump of the middle, except I'm not totally satisfied with the scenes there, which is why a couple of them aren't quite done. It's Feisal takes Orossy home and Feisal meets Rossa, and the timing feels off. Everything there is taking place in a span of two days, where it used to take longer, which might be all right, but it's just odd at the moment. Oh well. I'll get to the end soon and maybe figure out what should have happened there and when. Good news is, I cut some scenes from the last version.

Walked to Goodwill, which is eight blocks away, for the heck of it, and didn't spend money, although I was mighty tempted by a Robin Hobb book I haven't read, and a Melissa Scott book. They'll likely still be there for a while if I change my mind . . . Then I went to Target and spent money. -sigh- legitimately, some was food, some was cat stuff (who wants to haul the thirty-one pounds of cat litter up two flights of stairs for me?) and they had bags of sticky lizards for $1. Promotional materials, ya know.

Still no title for the lizard story. Help me out, I'll send you a bag of lizards. :>)

Got very little done on Orossy. I'm in the middle of it, and middles are just a pain. So it's not going anywhere because I don't quite know what to do with it.

Got more done on the--um, we'll call this one the deer story. Except I keep having typos and spelling deer as "dear." Yes, the deers will be dear to each other, but I won't refer to them as dears. And they're usually not deers anyway. Just sometimes. Have to keep with the animal motif I started in the lizard story. And there are no telepaths in this one. Amazing, ain't it? Nearly everything else I have has telepaths or some sort of mental manipulation.

Got a new cell phone because I changed my plan a bit, and figured I might as well get a free phone to go with it. Waited most of the day for it, sitting on the bed and watching out the window for the FedEx guy. Bus. Bus. car car car skateboarder bus Pepsi truck car car cop fire truck bus school bus bus bicyclist car car bus postman DHL bus car car bus FedEx, yaaay!

Watching "to Kill a Mockingbird" for the second time tonight after I got it from the library last week. It's really a good movie. I never read the book, though, and am embarrassed to say that I never knew Harper Lee was a lady until I watched the movie "Capote," where she showed up as Capote's friend.

Anyway. Back to one story or the other.

Slow enough here at work I got a working synopsis/outline done. Makes me feel better, because now I think I've figured out how to get through my book and keep several of the things I wanted to keep. So, with luck, I'll be able to get more of this done faster since I know where I'm going and how to edit written stuff to fit in this version. I'm sure there'll be some more roadblocks along the way, but this helps a lot. I'm not usually one for sitting down and writing outlines before something's done, but I'm starting to see the value of doing so.

And it's another thing that makes me wonder just how inter-connected life and writing is . . . since I was stuck on apartments, the book was stuck. Now, since I'm not worrying about where I'm going to be living in the near future, the book moved ahead. So, the answer would be to stop having mini-crises, and the book would be done by now. Right?

Right. ;>)

Today was a pretty good day. Got some writing done (except, it's sort of before where I wanted to start the story, so I don't know if I'll keep it or move it or what, but since the SHU deadline is this weekend I may just foist it onto my long-suffering crit partners and see what they have to say.)

Got a book I ordered in the mail today. After poking around on Melissa Scott's website, I found a copy of her CONCEIVING THE HEAVENS, which about writing SF novels. I figured it looked interesting. And--bonus--it's autographed! Woohoo!

Then I went to the zoo and got lots of good pics. Went to the Children's Zoo, where there's usually something of interest, and, lo and behold, look who came out to take a walk! This is Agra, the Indian crested porcupine, which is the largest species of porcupine.



And then I wandered over to see Mozat the otter, and he hopped out of bed and came right up to the glass for this cute shot.



Then I went down the hill to visit the kitties and to see the zoo's newest resident, Koya, the five-month-old mountain lion. She's about my kitten's age, and is still very sweet looking and playful.



Then it was up the escalator toward horn & hoof mesa, and look who I finally got to see out and running around! These are some of my favorite critters, just because they're so neat looking. They play like dogs, nipping and biting and stuff, but they play hard. These are African wild dogs.





Then up at the top I headed over to see if the Valentine's Day baby gazelle was out. Went a couple weeks ago and I didn't see him, so I was worried that maybe the storks in the exhibit teased him too much, but here's Val (my name for him/her) being shaded by mom, with another juvenile laying down nearby.

-sigh- I did have this way long post of me rambling about how I'm going to try and fix my book after I got comments from my mentor this afternoon . . . but I just closed the window to go to lunch (er, dinner), having faith in the auto save, but, *poof* it's gone. I think it's 'cause I opened a new window once and said cancel when it asked to bring up the saved draft. It's all right. Nothing terribly major that I would actually look at again, and just writing stuff out helps me think through what I have to do.

And what I have to do . . . is basically rewrite the book. Again. Orossy's still too much of a wimp and is rarely on screen, Rossa's too prominent, and Feisal needs more of a reason to fall for Orossy. Added to that, Orossy's got waaaay too many problems--too many alters (most of which don't really have a purpose, and therefore need to be rethought or deleted), a coveted telepathic gift that's somewhat complicated by itself, and gender identity issues. So, uh, I guess some of it needs to go.

I'm not frustrated, yet. I'd rather hear that something's not working now rather than later so I have time to fix it and still get my mentor to look at it. And, anyway, I haven't been able to write much over the past week or two so hopefully this will get me thinking of some knew scenes and ideas so I can get some words going.

Good thing is, when I get going I can write a book pretty quick. I just have to get going. Somebody say "Hooray for deadlines!"

But, we're sort of back to the drawing board in terms of plot; back to figuring out What does Orossy want? What does he need? What's keeping him from getting it? And how am I going to make him a lot more assertive?

In happier news, I got a CD of Varekai music. (Yes, I'm still addicted to Varekai.) It's all studio recorded though, so it's not quite what's on the DVD. The good thing is I found a used special edition CD which has a bonus CD with six live tracks which makes me happy. Good enough. :>)

So, somewhat inspired by one of the SHU scholarship requirements which says include a paragraph about your next book project, I've been trying to figure out what my next project ought to be. I dug out my first novel, because it really is something I want to rewrite and make work.

Except, I still don't know how to make it work. It is on the epic fantasy level, since it's going to involve three or four countries and attempted genocide, but, man, I think I realized I don't know how to deal with an epic fantasy. The hard part is that one culture in particular has a lot of societal details that need explaining so I don't confuse people, and while I don't want to do an info-dump, I'm at a loss as to how to get all the information I need across. Plus there's some big gaps in time, twice, before the story moves linearly, which I've never liked but also don't know how to deal with.

Bah. I didn't particularly want to write an epic fantasy. Still don't, because I'm much more interested in happenings on a personal level rather than a worldwide level, but in this case for one of my characters, who he is and who he wants to be is deeply tied to where his homeland, which he can't go back to without being killed until he gets enough allies to help retake it.

Maybe if I merge a couple books. Book 2 is a sort of companion novel that explains a lot of the background I left out or cut from Book 1. 'Cause I was just reading the beginning of #1, and realizing how disjointed it is.

I suppose I should also just rewrite the whole darn thing, and maybe I'd get a better perspective on it. Hmmm. It's also very hard to let go of certain events, since I've got them running through about four books now, and it might screw up the timeline a bit. Arrrgggh.

Just thinking out loud, here, 'cause sometimes it helps . . .