Words of the Barely-Published

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.

Hopefully, this year, I'll get *something* published. And just to encourage myself, here's the state of the two active novels under development, and the short story that's due in three weeks:

What Would Have Happened


Iron Debt


A Paradox of Archons


That last one would be much more discouraging if I hadn't started it less than three weeks ago. :) Happy New Year folks.

Protagonist in hole.
Author not in hole.

Protagonist is very, very annoyed at her author for leaving her in hole overnight. Her author is tired and going to bed while protagonist is annoyed because she'll still be annoyed in the morning, but more importantly, I will know where I left her.

Because if I stay up late and take her out of the hole, in the morning, she'll go off in all directions at once when I'm not awake enough to keep up. ;)

I am very amused by the dimensions of the hole. And slightly "oh dear, that's obvious in hindsight, isn't it?" jenett knows.

(Also: the AbsoluteWrite forums are very, very dangerous. To both my wordcount and my $payingJob. I think I will need to put a kibosh on reading them outside of lunch hour.)

GLEE!!

When science meets fiction in a fantasy story, science usually wins unless there's a lot of handwavy magic going on, which doesn't work so well in urban fantasy all the time. However, my fiction appears to be dovetailing perfectly with the science which I didn't even know was there. Hee hee hee.

I need to do some more research, but I may just have been handed a really spectacular thingy.