Word count: 115850 | Since last entry: 1684 | This month: 3668 I thought I finished the penultimate chapter yesterday. I was wrong. When I went to write the first scene of the final chapter I realized it had to be told from Jason’s PoV, so I went back and stuck it at the end of the previous chapter. Also wrote 200+ more words of notes in the final chapter. Sienna surprised me tonight with a Han-Soloish self-centered mercenary act. But, given the way I’d treated her, it was the appropriate thing for her to do. I couldn’t just leave her standing around, anyway. And she made it up to Jason at the end. Also tonight: started unpacking boxes in the new kitchen! Woo hoo! There are still a few details to take care of — we’re still waiting for the screen door and faucet handles, the countertops need to be refinished, and the microwave turned out to be too big for the space designed for it (oops). But everything else is done, so we’re moving back in. Yay!

Word count: 114166 | Since last entry: 938 | This month: 1984 Usually I post here whenever I write — if you haven’t heard from me lately, you can assume I haven’t been writing. But in this case I have been plugging away, generally in the last half-hour or hour before going to bed (and going to bed way later than I should) so I haven’t had a chance to post about it. I have been successful in writing a little something every day. I’ve done a couple hundred words most days, except for Sunday night after OryCon when I managed just 41 words in a bleary half-hour before I admitted I was too tired to produce anything useful. But bit by bit I have reached the end of the chapter. It’s a short one, but intense, and it ends with the reunion of the main characters of the two plot threads. I will look the chapter over tomorrow and maybe tweak it a bit before printing it for Saturday’s critique. Only one (long!) chapter and an epilogue remains now. On Saturday night of the con I didn’t do anything on the novel, but I stayed up until 2am with Sara outlining a story tentatively titled “The Push-Button Unicorn.” This is an idea that I had some time ago which I decided should be a collaboration, because Sara knows more about horses than I ever will but has little experience with short stories. We’re both really excited about this story. The convention was generally good. I had a full house of about 20 people for my reading on Friday afternoon, with reasonable crowds for all the panels and other items I was on. I got in some good lines at several of them, like the comment at the Mad Scientists panel on the Fantastic Method (regular scientists use the Scientific Method, which involves many experiments with a mix of successes and failures, while mad scientists use the Fantastic Method, in which you do one big experiment at the end of the book — if you’re the hero, it succeeds, and if you’re the villain, it fails). I was also in Opening Ceremonies (in which I died four times) and Whose Line, and though I thought neither of them went particularly well I had people coming up to me all weekend saying they’d hurt themselves laughing. Go figure. I also signed about a half-dozen copies of the zeppelin anthology. Add that to the half-dozen I signed at World Fantasy, and the fact that Wrigley-Cross Books in the dealers’ room sold out (18 copies), and you can tell that this book is generating some real excitement. I’m so happy to be in it, and I’m looking forward to reading the other stories. The downside of the con was that I was so busy on programming and such that I missed many of my friends and barely got lunch at all. But I did have many good dinners and conversations and hugs, and racked up a sleep deficit that will take weeks to repay, so it must have been a good con. And I just found out today that an editor to whom I pitched this novel three years ago is still interested in it, and is actually in a position to buy more fiction now than he was then. Opportunity! Gulp! But now to bed.

Word count: 113228 | Since last entry: 1046 | This month: 1046 I started and deleted several journal entries today, trying to express my rage and anguish over the elections, but in the end I decided that everything I wanted to say had already been said by others, in the blogs and LiveJournals I’ve been reading obsessively for the last several days. My failure to come up with anything I thought worth posting might be partially explained by the fact that I went to sleep around midnight and snapped awake at 4:30. Heck of a way to go into a convention (OryCon starts tomorrow). So today I decided to withdraw from the political world for a while. I listened to music on the radio, not news, and when I got home from work to find Kate, home from Phoenix at long-awaited last, I said “let’s watch The Court Jester.” And so we did; yea, verily, yea. There were substantial bits in there that neither of us remembered; I wonder if we’ve ever watched the disc before? After the movie I wrote on my novel. It feels so pointless, and yet in some ways it is therapeutic, because (see the entries from way back around the beginning of 2002) this novel is in part about my anger with the lies and manipulations of those in power and the idiocy of the general public. And besides, it’s NaNoWriMo, and though I’m not formally “doing” NaNoWriMo, my goal is to write a little something every day and I didn’t even miss Election Day. So I wrote another couple hundred words, for a total of over 1000 words in the first three days of the month. Slow and steady is the way to make progress. Slow and steady. And don’t forget to breathe. Oh, one tiny bit of good news: I just sold Swedish rights for “The Tale of the Golden Eagle” to magazine Nova Science Fiction.

Word count: 112182 | Since last entry: 2327 | This month: 9721 The above word count represents a half-chapter written on the plane to and from World Fantasy Convention. The “this month” total is for October. WFC report coming soon. Must sleep now… Oh, and though I am not doing NaNoWriMo I have decided to write something every day. And it would be a shame to break the streak on day 1. So after writing the above paragraph I just wrote about 200 words (not reflected in the word count at the top of this entry). And now I really am going to go to sleep. But first, one more thing:

Word count: 109855 | Since last entry: 487 | This month: 7394 I promised myself I would really, truly start on the next chapter right away instead of waiting a week or more. I promised myself it didn’t have to be good, and it didn’t have to be much, I just had to start. I’ve started. It’s not good, and it’s not much, but I started. Jason and Sienna are on the train headed back to New York. The outline for this chapter seems kind of thin, and I’m wondering if there’s really whole chapter in it. But I seem to recall I felt the same about the previous chapter at this stage, so I’m prepared to see what comes of it. Got my critiques on the previous chapter yesterday. There were a few suggestions about raising tension (the consensus is that the computer hacking scenes went on just a bit long) but really people don’t seem to have much to say about the big issues — everyone’s just hanging on for the ride at this point. I hope they like the destination when we arrive there.

Word count: 109368 | Since last entry: 1787 | This month: 6907 And in one great burst of writing I finish the chapter, with a long scene in which all Clarity’s plans collapse in flames. Things couldn’t be worse for Clarity now, which is perfect because there’s just two chapters left to go: one Jason chapter and one which is currently planned to be a Clarity chapter. I’m thinking of either breaking that one in three (Clarity, Jason, Clarity) or doing alternating viewpoints within the chapter — something I’ve never done before, but the last chapter is a special place and might not have to follow all the rules. In either case I have about six weeks for all that plus the epilogue. Fortunately it’s all outlined. Also, the kitchen is really coming together now, with countertops and tile and crown molding and it is just looking completely nifty!! See kateyule‘s LiveJournal for photos. I’m pleased. Very, very tired, but pleased.

Word count: 107581 | Since last entry: 305 | This month: 5120 Went to a voting party tonight. Here in Oregon we vote by mail (everyone, every election) — ballots went out last week and are due by November 2. So some friends convened a potluck to get together, talk about some of the more confusing ballot measures, and fill out our ballots. It was way keen — Kate pointed out that now she’s certain she hasn’t voted for any person or measure who looks good on the surface but has a nasty surprise buried inside. On the way back from the party we dropped off our ballots at the county elections office. Wrote a little bit after coming home from the party — I’m tired, tired, tired, after several very busy days at work (with no end in sight this week) but I need to keep plugging away if I’m going to make my next deadline (this Saturday). I wrote the beginning of the last scene in the chapter, in which protestors begin to gather around the Platforms. Lots of tell here, rather than show, but it would be insane for Clarity to be in the middle of this situation. I’ll strive for it to be as visceral as possible as things wind up to a fever pitch, though.

Word count: 107276 | Since last entry: 1186 | This month: 4815 I attended a funeral today, of one of my apartment-mates from college. Even though we lived in the same city after graduation, I didn’t keep in touch with him; I think the last time we saw each other might have been at my wedding, 13 years ago. He passed away suddenly this weekend, of a massive heart attack. We were the same age. I really ought to spend more time with my friends. A good evening’s writing, though. I wrote a scene in which… a major character dies. I swear, that’s what came next in the outline. And I don’t think the real funeral had any impact on the actual death scene, because the characters’ relationship to each other was completely different from my own situation. But it is weird. Very weird. I also used this scene to summarize the plans that the characters have made in the last couple of days, leading up to the massive assault to follow. Because, even though this is some pretty heavy action, it’s not really important to the main questions of the plot. One scene left to go in the chapter. It’s a biggie. I spent far too much time looking at a map of the world’s largest cities and an earth/moon/sun map viewer (Home Planet) trying to figure out the best time for a simultaneous worldwide strike on December 13, 2051. Turns out that, even with today’s population, 8am UTC (3am New York time) is the best time for most of the 24 biggest cities — it’s just before dawn for London and Rio and just after sunset for Tokyo, with most of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia in daylight. Only North and Central America, with 3 of the top 24 cities, are in the middle of their night. The situation will be even more heavily weighted to Asia and Africa by midcentury. Well, isn’t that going to make things interesting for Clarity…

Word count: 106090 | Since last entry: 1860 | This month: 3629 Usually I post an entry here every day I write something, but in the past few days things have been better for writing than posting. So, by dint of plugging away, a few hundred words on an okay day and a thousand words on a good day, I’ve got 1800 words since the last entry, for a total of 3500 words in the chapter so far. And it’s war. Civil war between two factions of the aliens. I didn’t know it was going to be war, but there really wasn’t any alternative. As soon as Clarity and company realized what Raptor had in mind, how great the stakes had gotten, an all-out military assault became the only sane alternative. I realized this by thinking about the question “given what he plans anyway, why doesn’t Raptor just…” and realizing there was no reason he couldn’t, or wouldn’t. And my main characters also know this, so they have to stop him by any means possible. And the means remaining to them are pretty slim. One good thing about this situation is that it really allows Clarity to show what she’s capable of. She’s uncertain whether she’s doing the right thing, of course — as any sane person would be — but she doesn’t let that stop her from taking action. And when a confrontation came with one of her Councilors — a confrontation I’d planned to end with him storming out, to show just how tenuous her support was — damn if she didn’t deliver a speech so rousing that he just had to stick around. It wouldn’t have been fair to her to let him go. Just as well, she has plenty of other forces ranged against her, as she’ll be finding out before the end of the chapter. At this point I’m wondering just how much violence is actually going to occur when things really start to roll, and how much of it to show on the page. I recently read Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams, where a really massive campaign is waged on the other side of the world while our hero, central to it though she may be, watches on television. This may be the only way to convey something this big in a story that is, fundamentally, about two little people in a great big crazy mixed-up world. So I may wrap up the actual fighting part of the war in just a couple thousand words. Or it might drag on in some form until the end of the book. Writing is full of surprises, let me tell you. Anything could happen.

Word count: 104230 | Since last entry: 350 | This month: 1769 Some progress tonight, not as much as I’d hoped. Too many other things to do… many of which didn’t really need doing, but I did them anyway. I spent quite a bit of my writing time going back and adding details to what I’d written already, and continuing to work out the outline for the last few chapters. Questions I’ve had for almost two years about exactly how the story ends are falling into place, and Clarity’s going to really kick ass and take names. Meanwhile, the universe being what it is, my whine in the last entry knocked loose a response… a rejection, 346 days on a short-short. At least it was an encouraging rejection. This was the first story I wrote at Clarion, over four years ago, and it’s already been just about everywhere that I thought might want it (which is why it was at a market known to have response times up to a year). Into the trunk it goes. But I still hold out some hope for some of the other stories still out there. Some good news, though: I’ve now seen the cover for All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and it’s fan-freaking-tastic. The book will launch at World Fantasy Con, Halloween weekend, so I’ve put up a page about my story (including the cover) here.