I want to finish all the things

My success so far this year finishing up both Bloodhound and The Cabin on Wildwood Hill has made me eager to finish more projects. I certainly have enough active files in my WIP folder. I've been working on Adventures in Zoology, which is more than half done already, but my recent work editing and finally proofing The Weredeer (for release in early summer!) has made me interested in one of its unfinished sequels, Stag in Ruin.

I have started a new, untitled YA and I think it's going to be pretty good. I'm not hurrying with it, though. This time of year I rarely plunge into a new project. It's more time to peck around and finish up old ones. And that's fine with me.

Eyeballing books

[This was supposed to be posted last night, but my internet connection died right before I hit 'publish.' So I went to bed instead.]

I think I have pinkeye, more properly called conjunctivitis. Sunday morning I woke up with my right eye gummy and bloodshot, and all day long it burned and wept. Monday it wasn't any better, so I bought some Visine eyedrops, which helped. I figured I'd give it a few days and if it didn't get any better, I'd go to the doctor. Then I remembered that I have access to The Internet!, so I looked up pinkeye and discovered that yes, that's probably what I've got, and that it has two basic causes. The more common cause is a virus, and there's basically no treatment except time; it's very contagious and people with viral pinkeye shouldn't go to work or school. The other cause is bacterial, which can be treated with antibiotics; that type is also very contagious although once treatment starts, people with it can safely go to work or school a day later.

I went to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and today I ran errands and bought books. I feel like typhoid Mary. Anyway, my eye feels much better today--I haven't even needed to use the Visine. That matches up with what I learned online too. Whatever the cause, pinkeye usually clears up even without treatment within a week to ten days.

I bought books today because my to-be-read shelves are getting really thin. I'm burning up the reading lately; I think the last time I was reading so much was in ninth grade, when we had half an hour free reading time a day at school which I augmented by reading during all my classes. I burned through the library. These days I buy most of my books, doing my part to keep the publishing industry going.

Of course, part of the reason my TBR shelves are thinned out is because I have actually thinned them. I do this periodically, going through and reading the first few pages or chapters of books that have been there a long time, and pulling the ones I don't like. I didn't count how many books I culled and took to the used book store today, but it was probably 15. I brought home 10, most of them bought used. And then I read one.

Despite all the reading, I've found some time to write. I've finished Bloodhound at long last, and--quite to my surprise--finished my aborted NaNoWriMo attempt from last year, the little kid's book with talking animals. It turned out just 20,000 words and I think it's pretty good. It has no market, of course, but I'm just glad I've finished one of the books in my WIP file.

Read and finish

It's been a grim and exhausting week, and a few nights ago I opened Word and clicked on my Bloodhound file. I wanted to read something dark and bleak, yet full of violence with a noble purpose, and at the same time I needed it to be something I'd already read so I wouldn't have any nasty surprises. So obviously I chose my own book.

I'm giving it a careful reread with some revisions on the way. When I get to the unfinished ending, I'll just finish it. I know what I want to do with it, and I want to finish it before the end of the year.

The end of the year. How did 2011 flit by so quickly?

Misfits

I finished Misfits tonight. It's just under 86,000 words. That's a lot more than I intended, but I'm sure I can cut 5,000 words easily and probably 10,000 words if necessary.

I like it. It's not perfect, and I want to set it aside for a while to ripen while I work on other things, but I like it. And it's done. I've written 86k words in about two months. Not NaNoWriMo speed, but not bad--especially considering most of it was written while I sat by my mom's hospital bed.

Next I have to finish Bloodhound, although I've got edits still pending that have got to be done first. The problem with edits is that I have to do them at my desktop, and I don't have a lot of desktop time under ordinary circumstances. I'll just have to grab half an hour here and there instead of trying to work on the edits in big chunks of time. Maybe that'll make them easier, actually.

Thought for the day. Er, week.

As my use of Twitter goes up, my blogging goes down. Or maybe I've just run out of things to say that take more than 140 characters. That would explain why I haven't written any short stories for so long.

Still not finished with Bloodhound. As I recall, I had the same problem with Bell-Men when I was writing it, only I rushed the ending and had to rewrite it later. I will not rush the ending this time.

I'll drive all night

Since I drove around all weekend long (seriously--I now have 500 miles on my car), I hardly did any writing. And my brain seems to be tired of Bloodhound, since it keeps suggesting I work on other projects for a while. No way, brain! I can't quit now!

But tomorrow is the start of a new month, and I really want to work on something else. So I'm going to try (once again--it's never worked very well in the past) writing two projects concurrently. If I work on Bloodhound during my lunch hour and something else--Stag in Ruin or Little Sparrow or Adventures in Zoology--in the evenings, I might get more done.

Or I might get nothing done. I won't know until I try it.

A perfect day

With all the excitement of my new car, I completely forgot to mention that I sold a story! "Never Be Alone" will appear in the spring 2012 issue of Strange, Weird, and Wonderful.

It's been a lovely weekend so far. I actually took Friday off work so I'd have a four-day weekend instead of a three, which was a great idea. For one thing, I doubt the car I bought would have still been available if I'd waited until today. For another, I've got a longer time to write.

Of course, I haven't done much writing. This morning I went out to Starbucks and did write a few pages, but before long I had to go back out to my car and drive around. I ended up at Target, where I bought a picnic basket with a cheerful striped lining. And that was the perfect choice, since when I got home around noon, Mom reminded me that the Fellowship church downtown was having a barbecue. We bought barbecue chicken dinners (that turned out to be wonderful), packed them up in the basket with a cotton check blanket, and drove in my Mini to the river to picnic.

The weather was perfect, the river lovely. We packed everything back up after we'd eaten, and on our way back to the car, we happened upon a small wedding group. A couple was getting married right next to the river, so we stopped (because we didn't want to be rude by traipsing through their party with a picnic basket) and watched the rest of the ceremony. It was an absolutely charming chance event.

Now I have Bloodhound open and hopefully pretty soon I'll start typing new words.

Endless words

Argh, I still haven't finished Bloodhound. It's just over 100,000 words and I still have a lot to write before "the end." On the other hand, that's how Bell-Men was too. Endless. But geez, I've been writing Bloodhound for almost six months now! I don't think I've ever taken so long to complete a book. I have a three-day weekend coming up; maybe I'll just push through and slam out all the words, and fix them later.

Of course, since I've been browsing deviantART with an eye to finding an artist I can bribe--er, pay to make me a cover for Evil Outfitters, I may not get any writing done for weeks. It's as addictive as TV Tropes. Well, almost.

Nearly finished

I'm nearing the end of Bloodhound, finally! It's just over 90,000 words at the moment and I'll probably be able to wrap it up at around 100k. That's considerably shorter than Bell-Men (the book it's a sequel to), which I've only managed to trim to 116k words (from 125k originally). I have no idea if having a sequel that's shorter than the first book is good or bad or doesn't matter. I'm not going to worry about it.

I'm glad to nearly be finished with Bloodhound, because I have a lot of other projects pending. I still need to finish the rewrite of Trickster Society, and I want to finish the first draft of Adventures in Zoology now that I know how to end it. I plan to do both in that order, and hopefully I'll be done with both before the end of summer.

Also, I just got my edits for The Taste of Magic and need to work on those. It would be nice to have about twenty more hours in every week.

All Tears

I managed to get some writing done this afternoon, for a change. I haven't written much on Bloodhound all week because I've been stuck. Finally I just started writing and managed to get through the stuck part, although it's going to need a lot of revising later.

Most of what I wrote today consisted of main character Cam and another character killing vampires and trying not to get killed in return. They were going in to rescue some other characters, some of whom had already been killed. Cam discovers their bodies.

At which point, I sat back and thought, "Who can I kill off? Who don't I need in the next book?"

Finally I made my decision, and felt awful about it. I really liked that character! He was a good guy and totally didn't deserve to be killed by vampires. I spent the rest of the work day considering that and how Cam would react to finding her friend's corpse, and kept tearing up and getting sniffly.

Since it's spring, I was able to remark occasionally to my coworkers, "I don't know what started blooming today, but it's driving my allergies crazy."

I don't have allergies. I just have a sensitive soul and cry over imaginary people.

Reasons for shorts

I wrote a short story today! It's less than 900 words and not all that great, sure, but it's a real live short story, the first I've written since the end of December. I wrote it for two reasons.

Reason one: I'm 85,000 words into Bloodhound but I've painted myself into a corner. Our heroine Cam is on her way with a friend to rescue her vampire-hunting colleagues from a few hundred vampires who have them besieged. I have no earthly idea how two people will make a difference in this case. Everything I think of smacks of deus ex machina. So while I'm frantic to keep writing, I have no idea what I'm going to write, and I thought I should drop back and work on a short instead. It hasn't helped.

Reason two: I got the edits this week for "Antler and Eye," which will appear in the Leather, Denim & Steel anthology from Pill Hill Press really soon. That was the story I wrote at the end of December, and I was impressed at its quality when I read it over. It's not perfect, but it was a lot better than I remembered. It also made me want to write another short story.

As I've complained before, I'm not all that good at writing short. I'm a novelist. But short stories really are worth writing, if I can dredge up ideas for them.

The words, dear god the words!

This weekend I decided it was way, way past time for me to catch up on my typing. I've been doing a lot of writing longhand lately, and it was piling up. I hadn't even finishing typing up what was in my old notebook and I was halfway through a new one.

So I made a real effort to type everything over the weekend. I wrote down my starting wordcount so I could see how many words I'd written longhand. But I didn't finish the typing over the weekend, so every night this week I've typed some more--not helped by the fact that I kept writing in that same notebook during the day.

I caught up tonight. My starting wordcount for Bloodhound: 60,853. Ending wordcount now that everything is typed up: 75,929.

Holy crap. No wonder that took so long to type.

Nothing but transitions

Bloodhound is now 57,000 words long. My writing has slowed as I have to work out plot points so that they're going to tie together and actually make sense at the end, but I'm still going pretty fast. I have the next few scenes plotted out and should have managed to write them today.

But I'm stuck in a section where the main character has to travel to several places in a very short time, and while in those places she has to visit different rooms and talk to different people about different things. In other words, I feel like I've been writing nothing but transitions for the last thousand words!

I think transitions are one of the hardest things to get right. Mess them up and the writing is clumsy, slow, and unconvincing. Get them right and no one notices. Every time a character moves to a new location or changes the subject during a conversation, or the action has to change in some way, it's yet another transition. For all the effort I'm putting into this section of Bloodhound, I'm going to have to revise the hell out of it to make it read smoothly in the final draft. But I have to finish writing it first.

My typing fingers are weary

Dang! I finally finished typing up all 20-some pages of writing I'd generated over the last several days. I wrote 6,500 words longhand! Bloodhound is now up to 48,000 words, and shifting into high gear. Best of all, the plot is coming together very nicely.

I don't necessarily prefer writing longhand instead of typing, but it sure is a good way to generate words. I always have my notebook with me. A few paragraphs here and there add up fast.

Now with double the Shaw awe

The TOC has been announced for Pill Hill Press's Leather, Denim & Silver anthology, in which I have a story. Thirty stories in that antho! Hot damn! I'm also not the only Shaw in the TOC, which is fine, because all us Shaws are awesome.

I'm still working hard on Bloodhound, which is already almost at 40,000 words. In most books, that would be around the halfway point. In this ridiculously long thing, it's more like a quarter of the way in. I'm going to have to rein in the details during the first editing pass.