Monthly Archives: January 2011
Chapter 21, by gods
| January 31, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Lament of the Dove |
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Chapter 21 remains the longest chapter in the current draft of Lament of the Dove, even after I’ve reached the end of it tonight in the Word Count Reduction pass. Not too many words taken out of it at all, but that doesn’t strike me as a bad thing; a lot happens in it, and nothing in it feels extraneous to me at this point. I think I did well to find a couple hundred words I could trim at all.
This leaves Chapter 22 and Chapter 23 to get through, since I’ve already touched on Chapter 24 by removing Nine-Fingered Rab’s last scene. If I get ambitious, I could maybe finish off this draft by the end of the week, and that would give me most of the month of February for the hardcore final changes before I fling the manuscript back at Carina Press.
Meanwhile, I’m already mulling a couple of changes of notable nouns: the name of the former nation of Alendar, as well as Celoren’s horse. I’ve been told “Alendar” is too close to “Adalonia” as a nation name, so I want something shorter and starting with a consonant, ideally no more than two syllables. That, however, will come in in the sixth draft.
This feels like a good plan. Let’s see if I can implement it. Wish me luck, folks.
And in addition to queries today
| January 30, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Bone Walker, Short Pieces |
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I have thrown just under 300 words into the still-untitled story of Elizabeth and Ross, and have accordingly finished its first scene. Elizabeth has agreed to help this desperate guy whose sister has been murdered. God help her. 
I’ve also thrown a few measly words into Chapter 11 of Bone Walker, but not much to speak of. The muse mostly wanted Elizabeth and Ross tonight.
Let’s see what I can do tomorrow. Bed now.
A Warder walks her city
| January 30, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Other People's Books, Writing |
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Every single writer who reads my journals knows a fundamental truth: rejection letters are part of the business. Doesn’t mean they’re not a punch in the gut every time you get one. The trick is how to deal with them in a constructive way.
I got one yesterday, and it struck me particularly badly since a couple of folks I know have had the recent awesome fortune of landing agents. The last thing I wanted to do though was whinge to the Internet about yet another rejection letter. Instead, I opted to get out of the house for a while. And although I had the phone with me, I tried to make a point of minimally checking the Internet, too, to eliminate the temptation to whinge. I thought it’d be way more constructive if I got out and did some exercise and maybe spent some time checking various used bookstores for a couple of books I want.
This wound up taking me all the way into downtown Seattle, then back up through the U-district and Ravenna, and finally into Lake City, Kenmore, and home. I walked about four miles all told and visited a total of eight bookstores, and I rode four different busses through the course of the afternoon. And even though I didn’t find the books I was looking for, I did come home with two others: Bloodshot, the new one by 
cmpriest
By the time I got home I felt less depressed and more at peace. Today, I have sent out more query letters and have felt more like getting back to work. One of today’s queries is in fact going out by snailmail, which is unusual for me since I tend to focus on the people who take email queries–but I’m needing to go farther afield now to find the people who represent more flavors of fantasy than “urban”.
How do you deal with rejection letters, my fellow writers?
Drollerie store live again!
| January 25, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Defiance, Drollerie Press, Faerie Blood |
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We now return you to your regularly scheduled ability to buy Faerie Blood and Defiance on their native turf, already in progress! My editor’s put a nice top-level link right into the store on the DP site now, so it should be easy to find if you’re coming in off the homepage as well. Have at, folks, and do let me know if you have any issues purchasing either book.
Offer still stands on the CDs, though!
Drollerie Press store is broken, apologies all
| January 24, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Defiance, Drollerie Press, Faerie Blood |
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Over the weekend, I found out from fellow author Tia Nevitt, who was trying to buy Faerie Blood, that our store at Drollerie Press had fallen over hard. We are still unfortunately undergoing technical difficulties. My editor serasempre
Unfortunately though this means in the meantime that if you’d like to buy Faerie Blood or Defiance, the DP store is not available to do so. Many apologies for the inconvenience, folks!
In the meantime I would recommend that if you’d like to buy Faerie Blood, my best recommendations on where to get it are Amazon for Kindle users, and Fictionwise or Scribd for non-Kindle users (and those latter two links should be DRM-free as well as far as I know).
Defiance is also available at Amazon and at Scribd.
And, if all else fails, I still have a small number of CDs with Faerie Blood on them that I’d made for the reading I attended last fall. I’ll still be happy to sell those to interested parties, $8 if you’re local to me and I can hand-deliver you the disc, or $10 if you’re non-local!
Watch this space for further news. I’ll post again when the DP store lives!
What happens when you don’t make quota
| January 17, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Bone Walker, Lament of the Dove |
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Well, I didn’t make it a whole month before hitting a day when I just could not make myself write anything. It’s frustrating, but it reminds me of two related and equally critical things I’ve had to learn to keep in mind when working on my projects.
One: it’s okay to have a day here and there when I don’t write anything. There are writers who can churn out several thousand words a day; I am not one of them. I do have a full-time day job, and that does slurp up a considerable amount of my daily ration of Brain. Especially during weeks when I’m running short on sleep, when I’m all thyroid-y, or both. Like this past week. I spent all of Saturday, pretty much, thinking “well gosh I should write something”, and wound up playing a lot of Unwell Mel and watching crappy movies instead.
Two: while it’s okay to have an off-day every so often, I can’t let myself default to that, not if I want to get anything done. So I made a point of writing a page in Bone Walker last night, and tonight, I yoinked some more words out of Chapter 20 of Lament.
I’m not bothering with posting actual numbers tonight, since I’m still sort of sleep-deprived and thyroidal. But this is me saying that yes, for the last two days in a row, Writing Things Did Happen. Slow, small writing things, but as long as they happen, I’ll get there in the end.
200 words ain’t much
| January 12, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Short Pieces |
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But it’s better than zero!
Mostly nicely tired from going out to play music at tonight’s session, and didn’t get home until ten or so. Which didn’t leave much time to write, so I opted for just a couple hundred words of something. That something’s gone into the still-untitled Elizabeth/Ross story, and in them, our heroine gets to flip out as our hero begs her to have another go at the vision that just clued her in about the murder of his sister.
Suffice to say Elizabeth ain’t havin’ NONE of that.
There will be movie watching tomorrow night, but I’m going to aim for a similar small chunk of effort afterwards, just to keep to the Do Something Every Day Dammit resolution. Twelve days in on the year and so far so good!
More planning for Oscar
| January 11, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Short Pieces |
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No brand new words tonight; instead, I’ve been taking down notes about the Oscar story and trying to get some idea of the other involved characters, and what the plot might be.
After my chat in email with my editor serasempre
I have only the beginning picture of the Warder in question, but I’m pretty sure she’s somewhat older than Oscar. Old enough that she is established in her power, but young enough to be still in her prime. Old enough though that she might look askance at Oscar as a potential romantic figure–and that’s okay anyway because if there’s any romance in this story, I actually want to downplay it hard. Touch more on the hint of potential rather than state anything outright, and focus instead on these two characters reaching out to one another because of their common love of music; hey, if it works for Aubrey and Maturin, it should work for Oscar and this Warder.
The setting is rural and coastal, although I haven’t nailed down where yet to my satisfaction. Nor am I a hundred percent sure that it’s set in “current day”; still thinking about that. (Since the trio of stories I have proposed to Deena will have one period piece and one current day, this one could I think be either.)
The plot that’s starting to take shape is that a migration of Big Creatures–some form of sea-based dragon–is violently interrupted when one or more of them are hunted and killed. My Warder woman is all about putting a stop to that, but it’ll turn out that it has to be Oscar who’ll be challenged to the musical duel, with the stakes being the lives of the remaining dragons. And my antagonist, not being an idiot, will be clever enough to yoink Oscar out of a Warder’s territory first. Muahaha.
More than that I don’t think I’ll get into, because then I’ll start getting spoilery. Suffice to say that the story is beginning to take shape.
Back to Bone Walker
| January 10, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Bone Walker |
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Tonight’s writing activity: just over 200 words into Chapter 11 of Bone Walker, just to remind myself where I left off with that and to try to get it moving along again too.
So far so good. This is ten days in a row I’ve managed to do something writing-related, and I think part of what’s helping is not having any specific thing to shoot for besides “do something writing-related daily”. It’s the least stress-free goal I’ve been able to think of, and it’s actually helping! I think it also helps to be loose like this since I do have so many different projects vying for my attention; this way, I can latch on whichever one demands my attention the loudest on any given night. (Still though the lion’s share of this attention has got to go to Lament, and I won’t go more than a day or two without poking at it.)
Wish me luck on keeping it up, folks.
Oh hey look Chapter 20!
| January 9, 2011 | Posted by annathepiper under Bone Walker, Short Pieces |
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I’ve finally pulled through the end of Chapter 19, and now I’m in Chapter 20! I’ve noticed that Chapter 19′s the only one in this draft of Lament thus far to have actually gained a couple hundred words, but that’s okay–I’d actually pulled in content from Chapter 17, after all. Given how much I’ve edited out of the chapter to make up for that, winding up with only a couple hundred extra words works for me.
Chapter 20 is one of the smaller ones in the last stretch of the book, so I’m not sure yet how much I’ll edit out of it yet. But it’s good to get the momentum going again.
Meanwhile, I’ve pinged my editor serasempre
Which leads me into thinking that Oscar’s story may well wind up in the FB universe now, and and that it could wind up being a novella. That’d work quite a bit for me. I’m thinking that Oscar’s story, Elizabeth and Ross’s story, and Millicent’s origin story would be a lovely trio of things to have in one book.
More on this to come!
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