Daily Archives: June 24, 2009
Meanwhile, this ought to be fun
| June 24, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Short Pieces |
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My editor has asked me if I would be interested in submitting a piece for a new Drollerie Press anthology set during the years of the Civil War. I’ve told her yes, and am playing with an idea set in the same universe as Faerie Blood, with a working summary that goes something like this:
A young slave woman who’s gifted with healing magic and who’s on the run on the Underground Railroad comes across a Warder who’s been driven off his territory by the war (possibly due to being forcibly conscripted into either army, but more due to battle on his Warded ground tainting his connection to the land and driving him around the bend); she’s trying to escape slavery, he’s fleeing from the army as well as his own madness. They are driven out onto Roanoke Island, which has been haunted ever since the disappearance of the colony there nearly three hundred years ago–by the ghost of its last Warder, who has been lingering there ever since the colony was wiped out. My hero and heroine have to join forces to not only cleanse the island, but also to defend it against a resurgence of whatever nasty supernatural thing wiped out the colony–and my heroine has to choose between continuing her flight north, and accepting her own magic and helping the Warder soldier establish a new bond to the island so that both he and the ghost can find some peace.
I’m going to look forward to writing this out.
In an attempt to kick myself into gear…
| June 24, 2009 | Posted by annathepiper under Lament of the Dove |
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… I emailed agent Diana Fox, who y’all may remember I last approached this past fall regarding Lament, to ask her whether it’s still okay for me to submit the revised version of the manuscript to her for consideration. She says yes.
This means I am now setting myself the goal to not only finish the edit pass on the fourth draft but also get it beta-read before , , and I head to Disneyland on the 9th. I have four more chapters and an epilogue to finish editing, and thankfully at this point, I think I’ve passed all the bits that need major surgery. So it should be down to a question of word count reduction.
Y’all consider this an early warning then that I’m going to need a beta reader or three to sanity-check this thing for me before I fire it off at Ms. Fox. The level of effort required here would simply be to read over the manuscript and make sure it hangs together coherently–since I’ll have killed 20,000 words out of it, and in some places significantly tweaked events, I’ll need to make sure all of these changes have made it an overall leaner and meaner story. Significant tweaking in particular has been done with Faanshi’s portrayal, trying to strengthen her as a character, and I need to make sure that works too.
General proofreading will also be welcome but not required.
So if anybody thinks they may have free cycles in the week or so before July 9th and will have time to chug through about 117K worth of novel, let me know!
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