What I write when I've finished writing

I didn't have anything to write today. I've finished The Trickster Society and I don't have anything lined up to work on immediately, so what did I do today when I had some downtime to write?

I wrote the query for Trickster Society, of course!

One good thing about writing one or two books a year, I get a lot of practice writing queries. Of course, I'm still no good at them (just consider the 100% disinterest in Bell-Men). But I keep plugging away at it because otherwise I'd have to figure out another hobby. Anyway, here's the query. Please let me know if it A) makes no sense and/or B) causes you to actually fall asleep.


Ivy Andersder is a troll--literally. It's hard fitting in when you're big, green, and scary. Ivy's become an expert at hiding her emotions as well as her fangs.

When her best friend suggests they blow off steam by pulling trickster pranks, Ivy thinks it'll be fun. But during their first prank, not only is Ivy nearly arrested, she asks a shadow person for help--and ends up in his debt, oathbound to rescue a captive fairy.

With help from her friends--five humans and a homesick leprechaun--Ivy breaks into a company called BioTech and rescues the fairy from magical experimentation. But BioTech is a sister company to the security firm where Ivy works, and she soon discovers it's also developing weapons that selectively affect nonhumans--including trolls.

One of her friends is missing and Ivy's job is at stake. It's time for the troll to show her fangs.

My summer baby is all grown up

The Trickster Society is now complete at 90,000 words--precisely the length I'd hoped for! It needs a lot of tinkering and editing and probably some rewriting in spots, but I think it's pretty solid.

Even better, I finished it without haste but in time to rev up for the first fall project. After a light editing pass on Trickster Society, I plan to return to my unnamed romance book. I'm hoping to finish it either before NaNo or during NaNo, depending on how much work I need to put into it. I can't remember how many words it has, but it doesn't need to be too long--something like 55,000 words, I think.

It feels good to finish a project. This one took me longer than usual. I started it in May and finished now at the end of August. A summer book, who would have believed it!

Pencils and Pens

I haven't been slacking from posting (much), I wanted to delay posting until I could say I typed THE END on the last page of The Trickster Society, which is back to its original title. And I have! Only I'm not done! I skipped ahead and wrote the very short last chapter since I knew precisely what I wanted in the denoument, and now I have to go back and write the big fight at the end. I'm partway into that, but I think it's time for bed.

But the real reason I posted is because I'm thinking about pens and pencils. I just read this over at Boing Boing about a revived famous old pencil: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/27/first-impression-of.html --I read the comments too, because it meant I could avoid writing for a few extra minutes--and I kept nodding my head or frowning.

I write a lot longhand, almost always in pen, so I'm very picky about the pens I use. I prefer the V7 Pilot Precise pens, although they're hard to find so I usually get the V5. Recently I bought a Bic 537R because it had a .7 tip, but while I like it, its ink is so dark that it soaks through the page of the cheap notebooks I use.

As for pencils, I've paid more attention to them than I ever have since I started working as a test proctor. You'd think all #2 or HB pencils are about the same, but oh lordie they are not. Last time we ordered supplies, we ended up with a lot of cheapass Office Depot pencils. They suck, OMG they suck. Half of them have the leads in so crooked it's impossible to use them, and the erasers pop out of the ferule on the other half. Some of the best pencils, oddly enough, are the ones with glitzy, elaborate decorations on them.

You know what I hate? Cheap mechanical pencils. They're crap. I'd rather use an Office Depot pencil. We have hundreds of cheap mech pencils in the testing center at work that people have abandoned. No one wants them. The lead snaps off all the time, they're flimsy, their erasers are tiny and not very good (and pop out and get lost), and they often just stop working so that you can't advance the lead or keep it in place once it's advanced. We just throw them away. Bad for the environment, bad for the test-taker, and a waste of money.

My gawd, I'm ranting about mechanical pencils. Someone needs to put me out of my misery.

Empty-headed as usual

I'm stuck on The Trickster Society, or as its shiny new title is, Shadow Crossing (100% more urban fantasy in that title! 100% less fun!). I have no clue how to tie everything up with a proper whizbang ending. I'm around 77k words in and have maybe 2k more that I can write without having to make a decision on the plot.

I tried outlining the ending last night, but I kept getting bogged down because, yes, it's hard to outline a big mental blank spot. I think the main problem is that this book's set in the real world, so I keep trying to apply real-world solutions to the book's plot issues. Why yes, I could get the bad guys arrested...but wouldn't that be lame? My main character has spent half the book training to be a bodyguard. I think she needs to kick someone's ass before the end of the book.

emails and titles

I'm embarrassed to admit that sometimes I submit stories to anthologies just because I want the comp copy. Thus it is with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Cookbook anthology, which I happen to have a story for--but I can't get my sub to go through! Anyone know if that antho is still alive? If they are, does anyone have a working submission email address? [ETA: I got the email to go through today. Maybe it was just a glitch this weekend.]

It's starting to feel like fall here, just a little. The light is golden, the air clear, and it's in the balmy 80s instead of the sweaty 90s. I'm revving up for the autumn writing season, which I'm looking forward to even though I've been writing steadily all summer. Suddenly I'm ready to write my head off, as many words as I can get down in a few months.

First, of course, I need to finish this book. I've tipped just past 75k and it's time to wrap things up within 10-15k words max. My goal tonight: work out the timeline of the ending and figure out exactly what I want to happen. Easy, right? Hunh.

Oh, and I'm ready to start thinking up a real title for the book. It's an urban fantasy, and The Trickster Society sounds like a YA book--but would be a good tag for a series name, if it comes to that. Any suggestions?

A Noble Sport

Rather than wait for my fencing aunt to make an appearance in town, today I went ahead and gave myself my first lesson out of a book. Fifteen minutes of lunging an imaginary sword at an imaginary opponent and my fat, weak legs are all wobbly and sore. I reckon this means I'm doing something right.

It's actually fun, this fencing thing. It doesn't seem very practical, of course. In modern fencing, one moves back and forth in a straight line like opponents in a 2d video game. In real life, anyone trying to fight like that would get a chair to the back of the head. But modern fencing isn't designed for real life, it's designed for, I don't know, people who don't like to move side to side.

I figure I'll learn the basics of fencing--I never bother to learn more than the basics of anything except writing, to tell you the truth--and then I can find resources that will help me adapt the moves to swashbuckling-type fencing, which is what I really want to learn. Arrrr.

It's the trivia that makes us real

Until I lost an online friend, I never realized how important you all are to me. The last several months I've been lazy about posting here and commenting on my friends' blogs. That's going to change. I don't have to wait to post until I have something to talk about; the most important details are the tiny, seemingly mundane ones that define our lives.

So...um. I've been writing like crazy the last couple of days. I'm at 70,000 words on The Trickster Society and coming up on the end. That's good, since it means I'm on track to finish at less than 90,000 words. It's taken me longer than usual to write this one--I started in May--but that may be good too. It has a more measured pace with a lot more carefully crafted character development that I sometimes skimp on in favor of action. There's plenty of action too, of course.

I've rearranged my bookshelves again so that the books are in strict alpha order by author. It's not as fun as the color-coded shelves, but I can find what I'm looking for again. Now I'm casting a frowning eye on my brick-and-board shelves, which is where I keep my to-read books. I need those shelves, so I'm going to try and read as many of the to-read books as I can in the next few months. And I'm already at 42 books read for the year!