"Even an end has a start..."
I neglected, yesterday, to give the title and publisher for the anthology that will be reprinting "Pickman's Other Model." The book, edited by S.T. Joshi, is Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror. It will be released late this year by PS Publishing, who are doing some genuinely gorgeous books, including the new edition of Bradbury's The Day It Rained Forever for which I wrote an introduction.
Yesterday was an especially frustrating writing day. On the one hand, I wrote 1,211 words, part of a new scene for The Red Tree. This is a scene I was adding at the suggestion of my editor, and when she made it, I thought it was a very good idea. However, yesterday evening, having almost finished it, I realized that adding it would entail a good deal of restructuring to the last two and a half chapters of the novel. Because all changes, no matter how small, create ripples. And given that I have only ten days or so remaining to get the corrected ms. back to NYC, there simply isn't time to deal with those ripples. Moreover, the changes to text and character that the new scene would create would, in some ways, be undesirable. So...I spent half an hour this morning writing a detailed letter to Anne (my editor), explaining why I'm skipping this edit, and ditching everything I wrote yesterday. Today, I have to try to add another scene, but I'm hoping this one will create very few, if any, ripples. For me, attempting revisions on a novel that I have come to consider, for all intents and purposes, finished is not unlike time traveling. You cannot even step on a butterfly (thank you, Mr. Bradbury), without changing everything that lies downstream of said butterfly. I don't know how many metaphors I just mixed, but there you go.
There are still a few copies of the regular trade edition of A is for Alien available, and I hope that you'll pick one up.
Last night, after a meal of won-ton soup and particularly hot Szechuan beef, we started reading Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist (as translated by Ebba Segerberg). And my new Colman-Rider-Waite deck came yesterday, and I spent part of the evening making good on my resolution to hone my Tarot skills. Later, we ate Klondike bars and there was WoW, but it was all spent running about getting the "25 Coins of Ancestry" achievement. In the process, we also managed to score the exploration achievement for exploring Elwynn Forest, though it meant charging past the Level ?? guards and in and out of Stormwind City. There was a PVP skirmish at Sentinel Hill in Westfall that we sort of started. I'm beginning to get a rush off the PVP stuff. And that was last night, pretty much.
Yesterday was an especially frustrating writing day. On the one hand, I wrote 1,211 words, part of a new scene for The Red Tree. This is a scene I was adding at the suggestion of my editor, and when she made it, I thought it was a very good idea. However, yesterday evening, having almost finished it, I realized that adding it would entail a good deal of restructuring to the last two and a half chapters of the novel. Because all changes, no matter how small, create ripples. And given that I have only ten days or so remaining to get the corrected ms. back to NYC, there simply isn't time to deal with those ripples. Moreover, the changes to text and character that the new scene would create would, in some ways, be undesirable. So...I spent half an hour this morning writing a detailed letter to Anne (my editor), explaining why I'm skipping this edit, and ditching everything I wrote yesterday. Today, I have to try to add another scene, but I'm hoping this one will create very few, if any, ripples. For me, attempting revisions on a novel that I have come to consider, for all intents and purposes, finished is not unlike time traveling. You cannot even step on a butterfly (thank you, Mr. Bradbury), without changing everything that lies downstream of said butterfly. I don't know how many metaphors I just mixed, but there you go.
There are still a few copies of the regular trade edition of A is for Alien available, and I hope that you'll pick one up.
Last night, after a meal of won-ton soup and particularly hot Szechuan beef, we started reading Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist (as translated by Ebba Segerberg). And my new Colman-Rider-Waite deck came yesterday, and I spent part of the evening making good on my resolution to hone my Tarot skills. Later, we ate Klondike bars and there was WoW, but it was all spent running about getting the "25 Coins of Ancestry" achievement. In the process, we also managed to score the exploration achievement for exploring Elwynn Forest, though it meant charging past the Level ?? guards and in and out of Stormwind City. There was a PVP skirmish at Sentinel Hill in Westfall that we sort of started. I'm beginning to get a rush off the PVP stuff. And that was last night, pretty much.