Friday, September 19, 2003



This was a good day, career wise. I got back two signed contracts! It was kind of funny -- no street mail for me for weeks, and suddenly two very nice things. I think that helped with my attitude when I went to work tonight. So much so that I have finished the editing on Crystal and the Stars. Tomorrow I'll go through and do the final formating, and off it will go! Yay! This was really not too hard -- just go through and check what the copy editor had changed and look at a couple suggestions she made. She'd already told me there wasn't much to worry about.

This is a major relief to have it done. I was going to do the work in Kansas City, but I forgot to tell Russ I needed the a-drive, which is a separate unit on his machine. So I wrote a lot of new stuff instead. (grin)

I still have the edits for the chapbook to do, but I don't think those are going to be too difficult. And I pulled up the fifth book in the series -- the one I keep thinking I need to rework from scratch yet again. I need to work out the outline for new material, and maybe just write new sections rather than reworking everything I have. If I could just get a solid grip on a secondary POV character, I'd be fine. But I keep waffling between three choices. I only need another 30,000 or so words, and if I would just make up my mind, I could have them in a week or so. Huh. Now there's incentive. Just settle on one of the characters and do it.

Hmmmm....

Emgergent is almost up to novella size, and I have about 1/3rd of the story still to go. I think it's going to be done before the end of the month. I'd be happy with that, too.

Glory is still hovering with about 176 pages left to do in the rewrite/addition phase. I want to clear things out of the way and just leap into that work. I'd love to do it all in one run. The story is about 116,000 right now, I think. I don't expect to add much more, but there are going to be a lot of small changes.

What else have I got hanging around? Not a whole lot, really. Badlands and Hope in Hell I think are the only unfinished pieces. I have two outlines for upcoming work, one of which will be for NaNo. Maybe more than one, in fact. I want to work more on those outlines, and maybe do the outline for a third novel as well.

I think I'm going to hold Badlands out until I get everything else done. It's going to be the easiest work since it's a rewrite from orginal material. Read a page, type, read another page, type -- get the story basically the same but the prose becomes much stronger -- especially for anything that old. (grin)

Ha. Can you tell that I'm fired up on the writing side of stuff again? Even though I had a miserable cold, this is still the first month since last April that I haven't had a major, serious problem -- from deaths of relatives and friends, to time in the hospital. The new medications are doing great -- I haven't felt this energetic in years.

And hey, two contracts can kind of make any day look good. (grin)

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