I can’t believe it’s the 11th and I haven’t managed a post yet. I was trying to post twice a week, then once a week... I am suspicious I’ll get boring if I post too often. Grin.

I’m up to 12k in nano, which is well behind where I should be. Still, it’s 12k of a 40k novel, so I’m still pretty pleased with my progress. My progress bar (I  make them ( Read more... )

Last night I won the most ludicrous debate of my life. It was a shining victory in a long line of debates-a true and epic example of my negotiation skills and unyielding stubbornness.

And it was all done from the floor in a fetal position, whimpering and convulsing in pain.

I’d started to feel a little ill and as my mother has been a nurse for ( Read more... )

I needed to take a day off writing today.

However when I say I’m taking a day off writing, what I’m actually doing is taking a day off the novel. Instead I wrote a few thousand words on a horror novel I’ve been playing with on the side. This is as close as I get to a workplace affair, folks.

That said, meka is still trundling along well. Much ( Read more... )

First of all, if you’re in the mood for a sci fi short story written by a beautiful, exotic, angry woman, that’s been lovingly collected in a hardcover novel with a bunch of other brilliant sci fi short stories, you might want to order yourself this book.

If the opening line doesn’t sell you, nothing will:

When the aliens invaded earth Lord Valery ( Read more... )

Time for a progress update, I think. If only to pretend I’m not as extremely boring as I really am.

I’d like to blatantly lie at this point and claim it has been illness and not Spore keeping me from doing any editing for the past week. I am still coughing up my own weight in phlegm every few days, but I could probably focus if I wasn’t too busy ( Read more... )

I removed a sentence that implied my thirteen year old main character sold prescription drugs to people on a street corner today in editing. Left in the word ‘bastard’.

At least I catch this stuff on my own. That could have been embarrassing in the beta reading stage:

“Hey, Tag, you know that part where your character becomes a drug dealer for a ( Read more... )

Oh God, my brain...

Please, someone, make the hurting stop.

So I decided today I would start working on the encyclopedia for meka. It has to be done. I’m going to need it to do the third draft and my agent and editors are going to need it if they’re going to have any hope of editing it... It seemed like a logical thing to do.

Why do you people let ( Read more... )

Today I finished the second draft edits of Meka.

However I edit on a card copy with a good old fashioned red pen, so I still have to type a whole novel’s worth of edits into the computer. Then I shall print it all out and edit it again, while creating a little personal encyclopedia for whoever is cursed with the duty of editing the beast.

That ( Read more... )

There is a scene in Meka where a doctor operates on a thirteen year old boy without anesthetics. The scene is from the boy’s perspective and he’s conscious for the duration.

At what point did my brain decide this was okay for a YA novel?

Though, admittedly, much of the novel takes place in a third world setting and the character in question is ( Read more... )

Well after a hellish first three chapters that are STILL a mess and will need a total of FOUR drafts before I can send them out into the world, I’ve reached chapter four of Meka. And thank god. I was starting to think I couldn’t write at all. Chapter four, however, has been brilliant. There were whole pages that needed NO edits. I had to leave a ( Read more... )