Category: Uncategorized

Yay!  She gets it!  This is an affirmation!  My work has been understood, and many of the complicated and subtle things that I was trying to get across came through on the first reading.  Yay!

And hopefully soon I’ll get the other side of the coin, the problems with it, the way things were too complicated, too boring, too unclear, too simplified… whatever.  You know, so I can make it better.

Better and better.

Actually, I haven’t looked at the novel in question in over a year.  Which is either good or bad for trying to work on it again.  What I really want to do is work on UTFBF:Book One.  So since I finally got some momentum back on writing UTFBF:Book Two today, I should be back on track with it soon enough, and then will need help editing it in a couple of weeks.

Sigh.

And then Book Three and Book Four and so on, right?  And then somewhere along the way I find an agent and a publisher and real professional help and then a year or two later the books will begin to appear in book stores!  And then money!  And then maybe I can stop this sill envelope-stuffing day-job!  And work on writing full time!  Yay!

Alternately, I’ll figure out how to sell a higher volume of books via the internet and local stores, and if doing that doesn’t take up so much time I’m not writing anymore, maybe that’ll be a good way of doing it.  And maybe that’ll attract a publisher and yadda yadda, conventional publishing, and then money and then working on writing full time!  Yay!

Okay.  So.  Getting weird here.

I am asleep.  I am the waking dead.  I am here and not here, eyes open and seeing nothing, and am I dreaming?

There is something in my head.  A pressure.  Like pain’s understudy, rehearsing.  In the front and like an upward force trying to erode away at the inside of my expanding forehead, or perhaps the force that – from the inside – stretches it out into a virtual landscape of flesh above my eyes.

Thus a crossroads appears, and which way to I travel?  Do I ingest anti-inflammatories and dried flowers to try to pre-empt what will almost certainly transmogrify into genuine pain?  Do I guess that it is simply not enough sleep and try to sleep-wake my way through a few hours of work to catch up?  Do I go jump in front of traffic on the nearby freeway and hope for the worst?  Worse than any of these, do I turn to coffee, drink the provided beverage and hope for the best with a different kind of drug?

. . .

Time passes, strangeness moves inside my head, down the inside of my face now, behind my eyes and like a tension in my cheekbones and jawbone, still pressing forward.  Diminishing in insistence without the use of any herbal or pharmaceutical remedies so far, perhaps just like so many other things if I ignore it long enough it will go away.

I wish I could post this from here, by emailing it somewhere or … something.  With a quick, illicit search I do not see any readily available MT plugins that handle posting via email.  The more I think about how to solve this situation, by creating a solution of my own and/or learning from others’ past attempts, the more my brain seems to activate.  I think I need someone or something to stimulate my mind more fully in the mornings.  Online comics doesn’t seem to do it, and there weren’t any real emails in my inbox when I woke up.  Something.

Something to wake up for, something to wake me up mentally.

Nothing new or real to report, but I feel like there aren’t enough flowers in my field. So: a post.

Maybe I should write a poem, to make a green flower, or a new short story, to make a blue flower. Maybe I should paint a new painting and photograph it, to make an orange flower. Maybe…

Maybe just another pink one.

For those of you seeing this post strictly on LJ, look at Modern Evil dot com. Green fields of flowers.

Anyway, that’ll be changing in appearance … soon enough.

But probably not this week. All sorts of exciting things and sundry things to look forward to:

Tomorrow night after work my goal is to … IRON CLOTHES! Yay! And watch a Netflix DVD, since I’m way slow right now on that, while I’m ironing. I should have a couple hours’ ironing to do, so no problem.

Then Wednesday night after work, mmy tentative goal is to … CLEAN MY ROOM (and perhaps enough of the closet to make it enterable)!!! Yay! Not so much on the Netflix DVD, but I have an iPod and someone gifted me the Jet album on CD, so I’ll probably get around to ripping and transferring that, and listen to Jet while I clean. Assuming I have energy. But I should.

Thursday night after work I destroy the universe.

Friday I have off work, so… I don’t know. Sleep in. Maybe .. draw flowers… maybe … … read some, or write some – lots of book-related work to do … maybe do some more cleaning, or just play video games. Then, at around 4, Pat will come pick me up and we’re going over to Jenn’s place for the New Year’s Eve party there. I’ve begun to have a sizeable list of things to bring with me, quite a haul, literally. A typewriter to donate to her son’s teacher (via her – no need for me to actually become involved with the teacher, I just supply the manual typewriter), which I shall have to pick out, either one of my Remingtons (which, although the oldest, I dislike for writing, which is why I have typewriters) or one of my redundant Underwoods. The Journey To Wild Divine, which, at $160, she can’t afford a copy of for herself, but which, since I don’t usit much right now, I am willing to part with – until the sequel comes out … sometime in 2005, last I heard. I’ll need it (especially the “magic rings”) back in order to play the sequel. My Nightmare Chess cards. And then, probably, my two bottles of scotch and my new snifters, so we can all sit around and play at tasting scotch. So. Quite a haul.

Then partying late into the night, and then … coming home and sleeping in, perhaps in contrary order … Then Saturday is … “free” – perhaps I’ll write more. I’m not as far along on Book Two as I’d like to be, though I made several hundred words progress today (which, in light of days where I wrote several thousand words is not very impressive – the impetus is not the same, now) so I’m not entirely stagnant.

Speaking of which, I’ve begun to get some feedback from selling and gifting these writers copies of my books, though it’s tough. Tough to get feedback, I mean, not to take it. Yes, of course there’s resistance, but I really do welcome your feedback. Apparently it isn’t as clear as it maybe should be that Ariadne is the same person as Dawn. I shall have to look into this. Also, there’s a chance that everyone at Trevor’s new school is an alien, which hit me from out of left field, so I’ll have to give it at least another month and then come back to it to see if maybe I wasn’t clear enough, and how to fix it. And uhh… Not much else yet, but anything’s good. Typos, people. I’m sure they’re there. That’s why the new one is called the “Pre-Release Edition” instead of the “First Edition”.

And so on and so on, and I better get a move on Book Two if I expect to be able to edit it and get it out by February. Whoosh!

I’ve been reading a bit about “real” publishing houses turnaround times AFTER they’ve accepted a book, and they seem to range from about a year to almost two years. Haven’t heard of anyone doing fiction in under 9 months (though admittedly I’ve mostly scanned listings and things), again after the book is accepted as done.

So this whole write a novel and edit it and copyedit it and publish it in under 30 days thing really is almost as ridiculous as it sounds. How about 3 months, though? I should have some reasonable feedback on Book One to integrate into it, plus reasonable distance to go through it again, by the end of January, so that I can release the Pre-Release Edition of Book Two and the First Edition of Book One at the same time, right?

Maybe I should make a little graphic of the lifeline of a book at Modern Evil Press:

Stage 1: Writing – 7 to 700 days, the roughest, unpolished, unedited version – available digitally, nearly live.

Stage 1b: First Rough – zero to infinite days, the completed first rough draft is available digitally while it is determined if it should become a book.

Stage 2: Rough Editing – 3 to 365 days, basic changes to the storyline and character development are made, obvious copyediting is done, no new digital versions are released at this time.

Stage 2b: Reading Aloud – 3 to 30 days, the book is read aloud by one or more parties for copyediting and clarity, and changes integrated into edited draft.

Stage 2c: Pre-Release Draft – 30 to 180 days, the book is available in an updated digital version as well as a peperback version, containing changes made in Rough Editing and Reading Aloud. This version persists for up to six months for feedback from readers and leads into Stage 3.

Stage 3: “Final Editing” – 1 to 30 days, changes based on reader feedback are integrated, any final tweaks to story and characters are made, continuity is checked again, and the book is read aloud again for copyediting.

Stage 3b: First Edition – unknown, the changes made in the “Final Editing” are incorporated into the paperback and digital versions and are released as the First Edition of the book.

Stage 4+: Unknown … wait and see, I guess.

That’s about the rough of it.

And now, seriously, it’s 11:40, time for sleep.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success.

-Albert Schweitzer, philosopher, physician, musician, Nobel laureate (1875-1965)

So, after years and years and years, I’ve finally gone and created a LiveJournal account, much to my chagrin. Should be able to comment reasonably on other people’s LJs, as well as (if they grant me access) read their “friends only” posts without … behaving badly to do so. I have also managed to make at least one module for MT-LJ integration work, such that new posts (actually any posts I manually hit “Save” in, going forward) will automatically be cross-posted there. Comments are closed there, instead linking back to individual entries here on my own site, so that a single conversation thread occurs, and on a site I control.

I say 2-way integration, because having Modern Evil post to LJ is new, but having LJ entries appear on ME is old – and coming back, soonish. I’ve got to make a few changes to the scripting, not more than a few minutes’ work, but I’ve also got to draw a new variation of ‘flower’ to correspond to external sites, and I don’t feel like it right now. I’m tired.

Actually frankly, I just walked back to the computer after what looks like … over 6 hours… to finish an dpost this post. I have no idea what I was going to say. Whatever. I’m going to go … probably sit at my other computer for a couple of hours before I actually sleep. I’m dumb that way sometimes.