status check

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And now, back to business

September 14, 2009 in Bone Walker, Child of Ocean Child of Stars, Queen of Souls, Shadow of the Rook, Shards of Recollection | No comments

Now that I’m back from a delightful sojourn up to Canada to see my favorite band, and now that I’m done with “The Blood of the Land” and editing Lament of the Dove, it’s time to think about what I need to be doing next.

First up is likely to be resuming editing Queen of Souls. Y’all may remember (at least, those of you who were following my now-defunct annathewriter Livejournal) that I had barely started editing the second draft; now I need to dive back into that and getting it closer to being formally queryable.

Meanwhile, I have four, count ‘em, four other works in progress that need attention, all of which need some serious review of their core concepts so that I can start planning them better and getting more work done on them. These are of course Faerie Bones (the projected Book 2 for Faerie Blood), Shadow of the Rook (Book 2 for Lament of the Dove), Shards of Recollection (which I never have been happy with yet), and Child of Ocean, Child of Stars (which starts okay but which needs further review). I don’t know yet which one I’m going to start throwing serious words at; I think this is a decision I’ll need to make after I get a bunch of outlines written up.

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Falling down on the job (Lament)

June 16, 2009 in Lament of the Dove | No comments

I have been very, very lame trying to deal with Lament, and tonight, along with medical stress, the nagging of my conscience got just too much to deal with.

So I went back and doublechecked where I’d left off in Chapter 20, and made myself work through a few more pages of editing just because I need to bloody well restore my habit of working on the thing if I ever want to get it finished. So, status check: on page 11 of 19 in the chapter, and holding steady around 4,500 words. Fortunately the scene with Faanshi and Alarrah, the first scene they have together after Faanshi finds out a Certain Thing about herself and Alarrah, needed less tweaking than I thought it would.

We’ll see if I feel like doing more of this tomorrow.

Edited since the last time I worked on this thing, which was too long ago: +37
Chapter 20 revised total: 4,546
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,491

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Wait, WHAT, Faerie Blood is nigh?!

May 21, 2009 in Faerie Blood | No comments

So we had our monthly chat on drolleriepress.com tonight, and some of the first words my editor userinfoserasempre greeted me with were “Faerie Blood is coming out this weekend!”

My jaw dropped. I boggled. I pointed out I haven’t even seen cover art yet, but Deena swears up and down the book is imminent. I don’t know if we’ll pull this off yet, given that this is a holiday weekend, but keep your fingers crossed, folks! The book may in fact be about to drop.

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Lament of the Dove status check

February 2, 2009 in Lament of the Dove | 4 comments

The last several months have been shaky for me on getting new writing done, in no small part to all the medical crap I’ve had to deal with. So I’ve been focusing on getting editing done instead–and in particular, in carrying out the recommendation of two different agents to edit Lament of the Dove down hard.

Those of you who’ve followed the progress of this book on either of my LJs know that the first draft of this thing was a monster, weighing in around 167K in the word count. By the time I started seriously querying it to agents last year, I’d managed to beat the tally down to 137K.

Now, the target is 117K. If I get there, I’ll have killed 50,000 words out of it. That’s half a book right there. The whole process is teaching me a lot about how to make sure that every last word in a novel absolutely, irrefutably needs to be there–because in Lament, with three different POVs, I’ve got a lot going on. And I can’t waste words describing it.

As of this writing, I’m 4,500 words away from hitting the mark, and I’m finishing up Chapter 18 out of a total of 24 chapters and an epilogue. I think I can get there, hopefully by the time of my (hopefully final) surgery later this month.

Wish me luck.

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