May 2005

Final­ly.

Start­ed my first draft today. My tar­get is 1,000 words a day, 120,000 words total, but we’ll see how that goes…

1,000 words today, though. So that’s good.

Excerpt:

The emp­ty city by day­light was one thing, but at night it took on an added dimen­sion, a new and whol­ly alien face, and it gave Cabrell an odd kind of spir­i­tu­al ver­ti­go, even though he was the mayor.

Even in the day­time it was­n’t quite right. The engi­neers were tweak­ing rota­tion­al para­me­ters, adjust­ing the spec­trum of the min­isun, mak­ing it all a lit­tle clos­er to Earth-nor­mal with each pass­ing day. They’d effec­tive­ly increased his weight, fid­dling with the cylin­der’s speed, and with the min­isun they’d pulled out some of the blue, added in some yel­low and a lit­tle pinch of red. They were doing it grad­u­al­ly, but he still noticed. Shad­ows did­n’t quite look as sharp as he was used to. His gait felt plod­ding. It gave him a feel­ing like he was just com­ing into the hang­over from a week-long ben­der, and it was going to be ugly.

Night, though, was worse. He was­n’t sleep­ing well late­ly, a com­bi­na­tion of anx­i­ety and a lin­ger­ing case of over­drive sick­ness, mild but pro­tract­ed, and so he’d tak­en to wan­der­ing his city in the dim blue-green light of the min­i­moon. The engi­neers had­n’t yet pro­grammed in the phas­es of the moon, so it was always a fat cres­cent, trav­el­ing across the sky in its pre-pro­grammed arc.

It did­n’t help a whit, either, that night in Caer Gwynne involved the dis­ap­pear­ance of the curve of pseu­do-val­ley, leav­ing him at the best of times feel­ing like he was at the top of a gen­tle hill, and that every step he took might be enough to unbal­ance him and tum­ble him down the gen­tle but long slope, gath­er­ing speed till he fetched up against a stone at the bot­tom, end­ing a bloody mess. It was ridicu­lous, but it’s hard to argue with the inner ear.

Remem­ber: first draft, straight from the horse’s key­board, with the inter­nal edi­tor as shut down as I can make him, the per­fec­tion­ist lit­tle beggar.

I should’ve done more, I know it. But I end­ed up blank­ing out in front of the tube, play­ing Crash Bandi­coot. At least I wound up get­ting a cou­ple gems.

I did “flake out” a half-dozen more scene snip­pets, though. Some­times it flows, and some­times it stops, and hope­ful­ly it’ll flow more tomor­row and tomorrow.

I’d say “now I’ve seen every­thing”, but every day on the Inter­net teach­es me that you can nev­er real­ly say that and mean it: Cry­ing While Eat­ing.

Seri­ous­ly, Pom-Pom, I’m about to pee my pants. « A shiny new nick­el* to who­ev­er can tell me who said that.

_________________
* And by “nick­el” I mean “noth­ing”. Sorry.

Well, I’ve got a new dri­ve, and a co-work­er was kind enough to take my old, dead hard dri­ve home and extract all the data off of it. So I have my sto­ries back, cal­loo, callay.

Now to find out if there’s still a war­ran­ty on the toast­ed dri­ve, which is toast­ed so well that my co-work­er could­n’t even for­mat it…

My com­put­er crapped out last night. My hard dri­ve no longer seems to rec­og­nize sec­tor 0, which means it’s non-bootable. I hold out hope that I can at least retrieve files off of it.

It might still be on war­ran­ty, but I’m not hold­ing my breath on that one.

For­tu­nate­ly, I have most of my writ­ing on a USB mem­o­ry stick. All but the last week or so.

Still. Dammit.

On the plus side, I have a spiffy new MP3 play­er that my dar­ling wife bought me last night…

Sub­mit­ted “Out­side, Look­ing In” to Asi­mov’s Sci­ence Fic­tion last night. I waf­fled a bit, but the guide­lines said that “bor­der­line fan­ta­sy” is ok. I think my sto­ry kind of squats on that borderline.

Five weeks is their stat­ed response-time guessti­mate. So… June 13^th-ish.

Wish me luck!

For those that’re inter­est­ed, click the title to see the 13,000-ish word novel­la that I’m expand­ing into my “snowflake” nov­el Earth Fleet. The text at the link is about half the basis for Part I.

It’s very rough draft, and the end­ing real­ly isn’t what I want­ed, and there’s prob­a­bly going to be some con­fus­ing parts, and I’m not real­ly sell­ing it very well, now am I? But if you want a sneak peek at some of the char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions of Earth Fleet, that’s the place to look.