All Things Aster

July Plans

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And lo, the edits are sent back to the editor and the novella once titled Cold Cases is going through the various transmogrifications it goes through to become a book titled Bleed instead. Various things contribute to the feeling of done-ness – seeing concept sketches for the cover art, finally settling on the new title, hearing that the ISBN-type stuff is being put into motion. There will still be work to go, presumably edits and proofs, but this book has officially evacuated the portion of my brain that requires tinkering and subconscious thought. It’s no longer a project.

Which means it’s time to get started on what comes next: rewriting Black Candy.

And since I’m house-sitting this month, taking care of the cats and chickens that belong to some friends who have dissappeared into the wilds of Europe, I’m going to try and pack the bulk of the rewrite into July. Once more into the breach and all that.

Almost Done

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I’ve been writing a sequel to Horn, one way or another, since February 6 of 2009. I suspect I’d started even earlier than that with ideas scribbled down in notebooks and such, but Feb 6 is the first time it migrated to a computer file that’s usually the start of my writing process. Since then I’ve voluntarily scrapped an entire novella draft, rewritten the plan for how I thought a series of Miriam Aster books should progress, and written a second novella to fit the new concept that was about 75% longer than projected.

Some days I dispaired that I’d ever actually see the end of the process – what started as twenty-thousand words about Aster and a talking cat ended up in a very different place. Trying to get there scared the shit out of me more than once; I have a comfort zone as a writer, and this was well outside it.

But it appears it’s very close to being done. I came home from my D&D game tonight to an e-mail containing edits from TPP and they contain the phrase “mostly line edits with a few comments.” After months of stressing over plot holes and backstory-wrangling, those words are freakin’ magical. It means at some point in the future I can stop thinking about the novella and it can go off and be a book. The curse of seeing this news at eleven o’clock at night is that there’s no-one to call and say “holy freaking shit, its almost done,” so I’ll say it here instead:

Holy freakin’ shit, it’s almost done.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to drink a glass of scotch and collapse into the most relaxing night of sleep I’ll have had since…I dunno…probably January.

Things that Happened While I Was Otherwise Distracted

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I’ve been distracted of late – either by trying to get the latest version of Cold Cases ready or hole-in-my-head drama depending of the day –  and I somehow managed to miss a whole heap of stuff happening around the traps.

1) The latest edition of the Terra Incognita Podcast is up, featuring me reading my story Black Dog: A Biography that came out in the Interfictions II anthology last year. Unlike most of the previous podcasts of my work this one actually involved me recording the reading myself, an experience that forced me to realise exactly how inarticulate I am in the verbal form (seriously; apparently I drop the consonants out of words and rely on vowel sounds and inflections to get things right, and we do not speak of how many times I had to restart things in order to avoid this).

2) Angela Slatter’s Brisneyland by Night is the feature story over at the Twelth Planet Podcast at the moment, which pleases me greatly for reasons that may or may not become apparent if you’ve read Horn. Brisneyland is part of the forthcoming Sprawl anthology from TPP.

3) My sister returned live and well from her trek over the Kokoda Trail yesterday. Notable primarily because my parents didn’t send me crazy with phone-calls when there was news of trouble in the area, and because she returned bearing coffee beans ready for my caffeinated consumption.

4) My doctor continues to taunt me by having me come in for appointments where he doesn’t remove my stitches, thus prolonging the wait until I can finally *wash my damn hair again*. To be fair, this is largely because he took all the stitches out last week and I immediately started bleeding like a stuck pig, but my head itches dammit and the ease-of-care was half the reason I shaved my head a few weeks back.

5) The yearly rejection counts holds steady at 7; the yearly acceptance count rises to 1; the number of stories ready to go out into the world is about to rise by 2. These statistics do not support getting to 100 rejections by the end of the year, but I’m about to dissappear and house-sit for the month of July and I plan to get a *lot* of writing done while I’m there.