The outline is over 6000 words long. The *outline*. And it's only about 2/3 done.

I suppose the fact that I go back and keep adding stuff to the beginning of the outline is good - it's much easier to consistency check the outline. But ugh, I'd hoped to be done with this by the end of October. At this point, the end of the first week of November seems more likely.

So much for trying to do this as part of NaNoWriMo. Perhaps that's a good thing - given how much editors HATE NaNoWriMo stories, I suspect this story will be much improved for a completed and tidy outline.

My inner creative goon would like to have that outline done, however, so I can start writing...

No news.

My wordcount has been eaten by any combinatoric value of $vacation, $payingJob and $lifeSucks.

I'm still trying. I'm just trying to row upstream faster than the termites can chew the oars off in my hand. If the termites would just stop chewing for a bit...

OK, I have no problems getting rejection letters, I really don't. (Ok, maybe little niggling ones, but authors do develop thick skins for a reason.)

That said, I got a form rejection letter back sent back to me in my S.A.S.E....along with a bonus sheet of paper requesting that I buy the magazine to help keep them afloat.

Yog's Law and common politeness do seem to be in agreement here, along with that whole "whiff of desperation." Alas, poor publishing industry.

I handed BRAWL the first three chapters of Iron Debt and said, "What's wrong with this?" I couldn't see anything wrong with it, but I knew there was. There always is, and with River's Wrath stuck in slush-pile purgatory, I have tremendous room for improvement here.

Well, they told me. Little devil boy up there is pretty much exactly how I feel about it. Ooo, scorchy! Yay, scorchy!! I'm probably going to have to sit down and assault using red pen. They don't want to see it again until it's done, but if I can whip the first three chapters, I am pretty sure I can *get* it done, because then, I'll have this *very* solid foundation to work on.

The Fabulous Margaret apologized afterward. She told me that she was sorry she'd been so harsh. I told her that was silly, and she should stop apologizing. It needed it, after all. :) And then we spent about an hour walking around, talking shop, and coming up with neat ideas for where I could go with it. I probably won't use all of them in Iron Debt, but I suspect that some of them will make it into Zytomancy.

Now, I just need to figure out where Ben Franklin is buried...

Well, after floundering around for ages with Iron Debt, I finally broke down and wrote a ferblungit outline. I don't like outlining much - I'd really rather sit down and see where the characters take me. But the place the characters were taking me was a corner, where they sat and stared at the wall, and then at me, and then back at the wall, and so forth.

Outlining always feels like writing code to me. I can get away with not writing out the algorithm I'm trying to create in the code if it's short. Scripting, for example, where the entire blat of code can be seen on a single 80x24 text window, I can get away without diagramming.

But apparently, outside of the exception of River's Wrath, I need to outline novels, just as I need to outline code.

I'm sure better writers than me have figured this out much faster, but hey, I can be taught. And I have sort of rewritten Chapter 1 to take advantage of the outline. Now the trick is to go through the next two chapters and finish the jiggery-pokery necessary to make them line up mostly with the outline without getting bogged down too much in rewrites. And then I will hopefully be able to resume proper writing.

After Wiscon, though - I'll be there, but I have no idea what panels if any I will be going to. I do intend to hang out with the Fabulous Margaret if she goes to karaoke, though I may not sing.

I'm stuck on Zytomancy right now because of the rewrite of Iron Debt's outline - I should just decouple it and swap the protagonist to be somebody else, it doesn't have to be the character from Debt, but that's what I wrote at first. The more perplexing problem is "What does he do with his answer?" I haven't answered that yet, so the story is still in the pile.

But I got about 1000 words written today (about 400 of which are outliny description bits) for a story tentatively titled The Things In Lybob Forest, so I am not at all displeased. That one will potentially go to my writer's group if we meet this month, because I'm probably due up.

The project at work that has consumed the last three months of my life has finally been consigned to the 95% complete file. It's close enough to done that I'm calling it done. (Much like writing, really. Deathless prose isn't. It just needs to be done ENOUGH.)

As if this were a trigger in my brain, I finished rewriting Easter Lilies and Imaginary Angels this morning, dealing with (I hope) many of the issues that BRAWL found in it. I've sent it off to one of my anxious beta readers who will hopefully enjoy it, and once she gets back to me, it can go start collecting rejection letters. Woo!

And speaking of rejection letters, I finally got my act together again to send out Trickster's Wish again, so hopefully I'll get back to having stuff out in circulation. When the rejection letters come in, the thing is to send the story back out again, but when one is stuck working 50-60 hour work weeks, it does bad things to the time one can spend working on writing.

So, onward, into the great unknown of storyland!

$payingJob is eating my life. Getting any sort of progress on my writing right now is a major accomplishment. Therefore, successfully getting about 400 words written this evening on a short story I'm noodling around with? Makes me very happy. The trick will be to see if I can keep doing it.

Wizards Don't Go Home Again is finally done. (This is the story that was previously titled What Would Have Happened.)

Finally. 4800 words and four months after I started fighting with it. It may need definitely needs some cleanup - which I'm sure BRAWL will be happy to tell me about - but it's done. Which I'm just as happy about, because I feel like it's important to have at least one piece set in the House of the Mad Russian running amok at once.

Though I am kind of hoping that the next piece I write is a bit less depressing than this one. I think the stress from $payingJob may have snuck into this one and tainted the protagonist a bit, though not nearly as badly as it did with Sufficiently Advanced Printing, which is probably never going to sell precisely because it really is just too much about normal work.

Unless I become sufficiently rich and famous that everything I've ever written that I'm willing to let see the light of day is in demand, and then some. (There are some things that should never be seen, though. *shudder*)

(But it hasn't seen print yet.)

As you may imagine I am quite excited. I'll be even more excited when the rest of the world gets to see it. :)