A New Year's Scribbler: January 1, 2014
The daily scribble posts are back. On New Year's Day, I didn't actually expect to be productive. I expected laid back holiday, wherein we ate a scrumptious meal, spent time with family, and kept our four-year-old tradition of a treasure hunt, albeit a week late due to my sister and I having been sick heading into Christmas.
We did that, but I was also productive.
Reading
Read through some Yuletide reveals and one of the two new stories at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. I also 'accidentally' stayed up to 2 o'clock in the morning reading Lynn Austin's Return to Me.
Note: I am extremely picky about historical and non-Old Testamental Biblical fiction. Most of it bores me unless it's written extraordinarily well. I tend to like Old Testament stories and I like classics that were written in historical periods, but not ones written about said historical periods. That said, I liked Lynn Austin's Gods and Kings series about Hezekiah. This book is set during a period of Biblical history that fascinates me (and is Old Testament): the interval between Daniel and Esther wherein there was Ezra, Nehemiah, Zechariah, and Haggai. So I figured I'd like this book.
It had issues. Overall, I liked it. Can't say I loved it because the prologue was fabulous and then the first ten chapters were so tedious that I skipped five of them and probably never will read them. The middle was driven by a bad promise the main character kept despite knowing better on so many counts it wasn't even funny. The ending was fabulous. So... mixed feelings. Probably won't reread.
I've been reading The Drought and Quartz as well and am hoping to catch up within the next month.
Publishing
Hammered away at "Dowse and Bleed" by tweaking four or five lines that were bothering me (apparently I'm one of those artists who won't stop editing until you pry her work right out of her hands), laying out the interior less hyphenation, and figuring out whether to add chronology to the cover. Also categorized it as a science fiction procedural per BISAC. Thank you, lithiumlaughter and in_the_blue, for helping me figure that one out. I haven't decided whether I want to add an excerpt for a forthcoming story in there, but am leaning strongly toward not.
To publish this baby in January, I particularly need to finalize the cover and finish pounding away at the summary, which I was doing yesterday. I thought it was perfect than realized it really didn't have a strong enough emphasis on what a special-type human was or that this was superhuman fiction. :headdesk: Back to the drawing board.
I'm tempted to work on Kingdoms and Thorn for the February story, but then it might be waaay better to do one of the other storyworlds for lots of reasons, so leaving certainty on the back burner.
Writing
Wrote 12 sentences instead of seven on book I should not be writing but is pestering me anyway.
Did some percolating research for fanfics in progress. I've got a particular scene I want to write for Finding the Ground and am still mulling over exactly where I want to check into Laurie. I think I know, but I keep waffling.
Also reread a bunch of Divergent series stuff. Is it awful to say I want a serious romance fic on the level of short story like what I write for Rogue/Gambit? Tris and Four have this serious fade to black moment and I'm pretty sure it was the standard fade to black and I wanted more. Additionally, I've got other serious Divergent plot-bunnies. I'd like to make them wait until I update some of my older fics so many people are waiting on, but no promises. Never those.
Collaboration
Discovered the joys of Scrivener for collaboration. I can add status notes about who worked on which part last, setting keywords, folders for our alternate chapter/scene orders and compiled files, etc., etc., etc. And we're sort of writing multiple timelines, so the brain went crazy with ideas yesterday. For collaboration, Scrivener is awesome.
Which brings me to...
New Arrivals
Scrivener: I officially love you, thecatisacritic. Thank you!
Duotrope: I thought about submitting "Dowse and Bleed" before I changed my mind, but now have a trial of Duotrope. I should do Heinlein's challenge in light of it, but I don't need the pressure, so probably won't.
Word Count
- Fiction: 49 words
- Poetry: 0 words
- Blog: 81 words
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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.