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 went on vacation, and then I came back and edits and $payingJob ate my brain. (And other things too.) Edits are hard work. Edits where I'm still not entirely sure what I want to do about things are even worse. The fixing of Easter Lilies is proving to be just about as difficult as I expected, though I know it will be a better story in the end.

However, the second story set in the House of the Mad Russian gained about 1000 words this evening, and more importantly, gained a solid end. Finally knowing what I was doing at the end really helped, and after a lovely celebratory dinner with the Fabulous Margaret I came home and proceeded to blat out on the order of 1100 words.

There is one scene left to write, and then BRAWL can have it and tell me it sucks. But compared to all the pain and suffering I went through trying to figure out what to do about fixing The Popinjay's Daughter to make it suck less, I think this one will suck in new and hopefully interesting ways.

And for once, I hope to have my BRAWL piece done early so I can go back to my blasted editing.

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.)

First pass at the rewrite is complete. Yay! It clocks in at just under 3100 words, and there are one or two transitions I want to work out. Also, I think I need a sympathetic snippet in there, just to show that one of the protagonists isn't a completely lost cause.

But I have some space to play with now that I know it's only about 3K. And I'm not unhappy with it. I like the first version better, but in some ways, the first version is one of those stories that I wrote for myself. This one's a story written for a rather broader audience.

I'll continue to try to believe that as I begin collecting rejection letters on it. (I need a list of places to submit these suckers. If I get Popinjay's Daughter done, then I'm going to have three complete, edited short stories done...and I will have no idea where to send any of them.)