Bleed (aka the novella formerly known as Cold Cases)

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.

It’s an Aster kind of day.

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First, a public service announcement re-posted from the livejournal of my illustrious publisher:

(The reprint of) Horn failed to be delivered today but I have rescheduled for tomorrow and they should then be out in the post to the preorders in tomorrow evening’s mail.

If you’ve been holding off buying your copy of Horn til they were back in stock, as of tomorrow they will be and you can buy your copy here. Again, whilst stocks last – I expect to have copies for sale at Worldcon but there were quite a few reservations for this second printing as well.

Which seems like as good a segue as we’re going to get to talk about the current state of the second Miriam Aster novella, Cold Cases.

Today I was full of virtue. I rose early, I took my daily dose of penicillin, then I settled down at the computer with a cup of coffee and a Bob Dylan CD and vowed to remain there until the problem of not having a finished version of Cold Cases  was finally solved. I have convinced myself this is doable by promising that a finished draft today means I can take tomorrow off and prepare my next D&D game before we play on Thursday.

That was about seven hours ago, and since then I’ve heard Bob sing Everybody Must Get Stoned about twelve times. It appears to be working too, but I suspect seven hours of Bob Dylan is my limit.

The upside is that I’m finally tackling the pacing problems at the end of the novella, which is a very stop-start process where I build a scene and then figure out what still needs to be done to connect it to the finale. I figure that gives at least a 60% chance of hitting the end some time tonight (the end, of course, being an arbitry stopping point where I look for beta-readers who can point out where I’ve done stupid things that need fixing).

My to-do list

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At some point today I’m planning on making cupcakes, which means I have to clean the mixing bowl, which means I have to eat the salad currently sitting in the mixing bowl as it occupies a shelf of my fridge. And I frickin’ hate salad. There is no reasonable excuse for lettuce.

At some point today I’m going to continue going through the Cold Cases draft, engaging in all the chapter-by-chapter tinkering that needs to be done before I hand the manuscript over. I am still unsure of this book, but that doesn’t bother me too much. I am unsure of everything I write that’s longer than 1000 words.

At some point today I’m going to vacuum the seemingly endless carpet of shed hair that covers the floor of my house. On the plus side, that’s not going to be a problem for the next few months. There is some pretty simple math that gets done when your lazy, your hair is irritating you, and you own a set of hair clippers. I release the following photograph into the wild in order to forestall the inevitable “You’ve had a haircut” conversations that are likely to occur over the next few weeks:

At some point today I’m going to remember where I put my beanie, ’cause my head is cold without all the hair that used to insulate it.

At some point today I’m going to enter the handwritten short-story I’ve been working on when I go to bed into the computer, and I’m going to attempt to finish it.

At some point today I’m going to mention that an audio version of Clockwork, Patchwork, and Raven is being put together by the Beam Me Up podcast and part one is already live.

At some point today I’m going to watch the new episode of Doctor Who, although given the length of my to-do list this may not happen until tomorrow.

At some point today I’m going to write an author bio and mail it off. I’m also going to write 750 words on my novel, 750 words on my short story, and not freak out about how bad either of these things are at the moment.