Words of the Barely-Published

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!

Easter Lilies isn't done. I *think* I've figured out the major thing that was driving me up the wall on it, but I just don't have the energy to work on it tonight. I had enough trouble just generating some minimal momentum on What Would Have Happened this morning.

But I persevere. Wordcount *did* happen today, in spite of insufficient sleep, cold weather, and computer problems. (The computer problems are the reason I'm not sure how MUCH wordcount I generated - the data is currently trapped on a flash disk I'm too tired to jump through the hoops to access right now.)

I started poking at Easter Lilies and Imaginary Angels this evening. I can see some places that need some serious work in here now, and I need to reread all of BRAWL's crits, but it's salvageable, and more importantly, aside from one day in early November, this is the first time I've felt like I might manage any writing at all for the past month.

Granted, the holidays are going to eat my life, but it's something.

It also has the nice side benefit of shutting up Ms. Grumpy-Protagonist-in-Hole over there, as she's also the protag for Easter Lilies. ;)

F&SF rejected "Trickster's Wish" yesterday - I don't think I'm ever going to get anywhere with them, but I keep trying...

...anyway, it went back out to a hopefully-more-receptive publisher this morning.

I've been trying to get somewhere with the first draft of "Easter Lilies" but it's just not wanting to play at all. I'm very grumpy about it. Almost grumpy enough to refuse to show it to BRAWL. :/

Today was a beautiful, beautiful day. I thought I was going out early, but ended up ambushed by a nap where I dreamed about writing with a friend of mine.

Mildly inspired by that and the beautiful weather, I girded on my lumbar pack, complete with laptop, trekked down to my favorite pub, got a couple of pints of hard cider, and started writing. While I had been walking, as it is a bit of a hike, I'd been thinking, "I want to write a short story about the protagonist from River's Wath, preferably set before Iron Debt, just so that I can establish that she has been Doing Things." I started thinking about what she might have been doing, and since it's a proper walk, I had enough time to come up with something of a premise.

About 2000 words after I started, I realized there was a wait at the door for seats, so I got up, picked up my laptop, and went over to my favorite local place to get chocolate, and got mocha and a chocolate croissant, and wrote the rest of it. It clocks in at about 3400 words, which isn't bad at all for not having even had a story idea when I started walking.

It's still in first draft format - very, very rough - but Easter Lilies and Imaginary Angels is now written. This is the very first story I've ever written in a single go, which is quite startling to me.

There will be a great deal of editing, I suspect. But I'm not unpleased at all. Or as one of my friends who makes things for a living says on a regular basis, "I'm not embarrassed."