Your kids are grown, you own your own house, and you have at least some desire not to inflict upon your children the kind of hell me, my wife, and my in-laws have been going through. I offer 10 tips to keep your house from becoming the 9th circle of hades.
The good news is that I got Valentine's Night polished up, printed out, and sent off to Eleanor today. This is the second spec manuscript I've written in as many years, in addition to finishing off Prophets for DAW. Here's hoping it does as well as Lilly's Song. This means, now that I got the rewrites done on three novels, I get to start on the next book in the Apotheosis Trilogy sometime before the end of the month. This means the counters will finally start moving again.Now, the reason I'm not starting the new book right now leads me to the bad news. . .You see, my mother-in-law has dementia and has moved into assisted living. This is a good thing, as she is, to put it kindly, obstinate and difficult to deal with. As in there was no way we would ever get her to agree to move, we had to check her into the ER after she wandered off and have her shipped directly from the hospital to the assisted living facility the following Monday. She's royally pissed at my wife, when she's coherent, but she now gets three meals a day, social interaction, and the occasional shower.The bad news is her house. I get to spend this weekend cleaning out a house that hasn't been vacuumed, dusted, tidied or otherwise cleaned out in nearly a decade. Parts of it are near collapse. There's mold, bugs, rats and things I don't even want to think about. I'm afraid I'm about to run out of dumpster. I'm exhausted, and I've barely started on what promises to be a very long weekend.The way I get through crap like this? I promise myself that it will make it into a story someday.
I drive a 12-year old Buick Century, a car that leads to certain expectations— most of which involve liver spots and driving 15 mph down the freeway with the left blinker on. Since I'm a chubby bearded guy with a ponytail, my car's sort of incongruous. (Though cheap as dirt to maintain.)This is how incongruous. If a cop pulled me over on the way home today and made me pop the trunk, they would have discovered the following items (in no particular order.)
My existential title crisis is over!And and the winner is: *drumroll*Lilly's SongNow we just need to decide if it's "A Wolfbreed Novel" or "A Novel of the Wolfbreed"
"Irreconcilable editorial differences."That's the word as Signet and Cassie Edwards part ways.Thanks to the Smart Bitches for the tip. (Or, if you're the AP, the Smart B------)
Economic stimulus, YEA!But, please note the oddity in the following scenario:I do my taxes, and per usual, am cutting the Government a honking big check. So we're in the position of sending them about $2500 (over and above what we've given them to date) so they can give us $1200. Can someone please tell me why these dipwads at the IRS could not include a little box on the 1040 that said "please debit my rebate bribe from my current tax due the amount you're already extorting from me."This gives me the same WTF headache I get when I hear anyone talking about taxing any government benefit. (Here's a thought, just hand out that much less and the net effect is the same, and you cut down on paperwork and bureaucracy. . .)So they force me to give them money when they'll just hand it back to me. Well, that stimulus is going right back in August's estimated tax payment. That'll show them.
Now that I finished the unscheduled spec novel (the first draft anyway) I am now in the throes of doing an editorial rewrite on Wolfbreed #1 (did I mention I need titles?) which will probably take me through mid-April (tax day, wheee). After that's done the plan is now to attack the second book of Apotheosis, and then Wolfbreed #2 (Did I mention, yeah, I think I did.) and then finish off Apotheosis.Since what I laid out there is about 18 months work, and a lot can happen in a year and a half, this probably only has a marginal relation to reality. But the upshot is, I'm in re-write land, so we won't have any counters moving for a month or so.
Blogging is taking a back seat to the new novel (30K+ yea me!) And yes, I bumped up the total wordage of Valentine's Night, the spec novel I'm working on while waiting to hear back from Anne. Two reasons.
Well my latest spec project is still rolling along quickly, quickly enough that if Anne continues being overworked at Bantam, I might get the whole thing done before I have to do any editorial revisions on Wolfbreed #1 (titles, I need titles). I started it a week and a half ago, and I have 23K words. The good news is, unlike Wolfbreed I do not anticipate going back and completely revising everything halfway in. (Of course, I just jinxed myself, as I didn't have any plans like that for Wolfbreed at this point.)For those curious, I have returned to vampires. However this is going to be unrelated to the pair of Blood & Rust novels. I'm trying my hand at an intentional paranormal romance. One that kicks most of the late 20th Century's contribution to the vampire mythos to the curb. No blood-drinking cabals conspiring in the darkness, no angsty goth heroes, and no supernatural vampire hunters of whatever dynasty.
So I finished and turned in the Prophets draft. My next project is Wolfbreed #2 (Still need titles for those) but I can't really start until Anne at Bantam gets back to me, approving the outline for the next book. Since I didn't want to jump into the next Apotheosis book and have to interrupt it, I was just taking a short break. . .My Muse didn't like that. Like the attack that resulted in Wolfbreed #1, I was sitting, minding my own business, and my muse bitch-slapped me with an idea I just had to start on. As of right now, after about four days, I have nearly 10K words. It's deja vu all over again.I even went and added a counter for it.
For those interested, and who're in the area:I'll be signing books at the Gray & Co. booth @ the Cleveland Home & Garden Show at the IX Center (directions) on 2/8/08 from 7:00pm to 8:00pm.BOOTH LOCATIONBooth #379. Enter from the West Entrance. Head to the leftthrogh the fountain area towards the Bella Italia Bistro (or followAisle 300 to CBG Cleveland Magazine Feature booth). Head towards theGardenArea, we will be the last booth on the left (after ClevelandMagine, and WDOK; across from Petiti's Garden Stage) before youenter the Garden Area -- Next to Garden G1 for Soeder Landscaping.
It's a new year and I've revised my project counters. I have ditched the counter for The Unicorns of Hunting Valley because it seems very unlikely I'll be able to justify getting back to it any time in the near future. (As in, any time in 2008.) I've added a counter for book 2 in the Apotheosis Trilogy, which, barring catastrophe, should be done some time this upcoming year.I've also added a counter for the book two in the Wolfbreed series.Note, some title changes here. I've talked with Anne Groell at Bantam and it looks as if "Wolfbreed" will be the title for the series-- which makes sense given how I intend to follow the book up going forward.So the first book, which up to now I've been calling "Wolfbreed" will actually be printed under the title "Wolfbreed:[something else I need to think up]." I'll post here when I have a clue what the final title will be.And, if you're curious, book two is set in 14th century Poland.
Well it looks like I'm going to fall short of my self-imposed deadline for Prophets. I went and caught the flu. When I get to feeling this kind of blah, I find it hard to read, much less write. So down to around 500 words a day for the time being. On a more pleasant note the contracts from Bantam showed up today.
I didn't write a chapter 12 for Prophets.No, I didn't leave anything out, I just went straight from 11 to 13.No, I don't know how it happened.Yes, this is a sort of pointless comment.
Happy New Year!(Remember to write "08" on your checks now.)
But I still managed about 2500 words a day, which is pretty respectable output when I'm not under the whip of my muse. When you subtract the two days where I had an output of approximately nil (one celebrating X-mas with my Mom, the other X-mas with the in-laws), I actually made my 3500 word/day goal. The counter stands at 91%, and I think that my initial word count estimate may in fact be pretty damn close for once. I didn't finish the draft, but we're clearly at the point where when I get to the right point I can turn it in.Notice though, I didn't say "end." unlike Hostile Takeover, Apotheosis doesn't quite lend itself to three independent chunks the way that trilogy did. This one is going to be a bit of a cliffhanger.
Instead of waxing poetic about all the really cool things I got for x-mas, I thought I'd collect all the stuff sitting in my office that used to be really cool. Remember, eventually that iPhone's going to join this little montage:We got here on top, the Ultimate Doom, which needed 5 whole disks to install. We have the first iPod, pre-windows, with 5 gigs of storage and a firewire connection that will fit no current iPod accessories. In the middle there we have two flash drives 32MB and 128MB. On the right there we have one of the first smart phones, a Nokia 3650, with a Symbian OS that had a Commodore 64 emulator on it before it died. On the bottom there we have the last word in 20th Century unreliable mass storage, a couple of Iomega Zip disks that hold a whole 100 Megs.
Well I've hit the first landmark in the Apotheosis Trilogy I've felt worth posting about. I have reached the quarter mark on the trilogy as a whole. Word-count subject to change, as I've assumed that book #1 is going to be a little longer than the next two. Speaking of book one, I'm a little past the 2/3 mark, and I'm hoping to get the first draft wrapped up sometime in early January.BTW- here's a good rule of thumb. The more fragmented your POV, the more characters and settings, the more tightly you need to adhere to an explicitly linear time-line. If you have events separated by several light-years that converge and diverge as the players move about-- you better draw up a literal time-line(s). I have an Excel spreadsheet with columns for various characters so I can track when stuff happened.
You may have heard of the non-profit initiative called “One Laptop Per Child.” It is essentially an attempt to bridge the technology divide between the technological west and the developing world. OLPC was founded by Nicholas Negroponte with the goal of producing a laptop as cheaply as possible and provide it to schoolchildren all over the world. While development goal was a laptop under $100, they’ve managed a production model at under $200, which seems quite in line with the group’s mission. The XO is being produced and distributed as we speak.Now, of course, since the hardware takes up most of that $200 cost, the XO runs a Linux OS and associated open source software. And we all know that when someone actually distributes an inexpensive flash-based Linux laptop, God kills a Microsoft Marketing VP.Funny thing is, whenever someone opens a market, Microsoft wants to stick its 800 lb gorilla foot in it. Doesn’t matter how much sense it makes, they want some of that hot Third-World computing action and they’re asking OLPC to beef up the hardware so the XO has half a chance of running a suitably crippled version of Windows XP. Wow. They’re whining about being locked out of hardware when they’ve gone out of their way to dictate terms to hardware vendors that would make it impossible to run a non-proprietary (i.e. non-Windows) OS— and incidentally making sure the same hardware doesn’t even work with Vista a fair bit of the time.Apparently, SFWA doesn’t have a lock on irony.
At least that’s how it’s looking. With help from my kick-ass agent, Eleanor, I’ve sold Wolfbreed and a subsequent novel to Anne Groell at Bantam/Spectra for an advance a bit more than three times what DAW was giving me. Contracts are being written as we speak, and by this time next month, I will be the newest author at Bantam. Or, at least one of me will be. We haven’t talked bylines yet, though Eleanor thinks that Wolfbreed may be an S. A. Swiniarski book.We will pause this blog post for an important message:WAHOOO!!!!We now return to your regularly scheduled blog.We can add to this news the amusing wrinkle that will probably make a few friends of mine’s head ‘splode:I’ve become a romance author.Ok, it’s dark paranormal historical romance (and how deep can we subclass a genre?) but still. Now, from earlier posts you might have gathered that I was expecting this. I was. But I don’t think anyone else was. This includes Anne at Bantam who approached the subject of genre very gingerly; in her words “Some boys are scared by the label.” She obviously expected some resistance on my end. Frankly I am the last person to look down on anyone’s genre, and given the way SF has been treated historically, I think any SF writer that peers down his nose at romance writers is an arrogant twit.
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