Deborah has grown jealous of Mary and Brooke and their apparently untouchable position as apples of mine eye, and has come out of left field with an ENTIRE COMMANDO SQUAD to support her claim to awesomeness. Behold:

* "The No-Punctuation Brigade is pulling a raid and arresting this comma. Bye-bye."
* "The comma from before has been relocated to this prison: he lives here now."
* "The No-Punctuation Brigade is arresting that first comma as looking suspicious."
* "The No-Punctuation Brigade is now employing snipers and has picked off the first comma. Head-shot."

From Brooke, in reaction to a bit of text:

* "Hee hee hee. Thoughtbubble with Raysel holding a flame-thrower, setting Sesame Street on fire."

Also from Brooke, on her never-ending campaign against my tendency towards excessive verbiage:

* "LARGELY. LAGOON. NOW."
* "Usually, you look like of lonely and awkward there. Why don't you come over here, to my nice, soothing LARGELY LAGOON. The alligators will cuddle with you."
* "Yoohoo! Free daiquiris in the LAGOON. What? You say the lagoon smells like lye, and no one ever seems to come out of the lagoon? Ha ha, what a card you are!"

Let's review. My manuscripts are a) apparently monitored by a crack commando squad that believes in shooting innocently misplaced punctuation in the head, and b) have a direct connection to a death-trap lagoon full of alligators.

I knew I liked writing for a reason.

Last night, after a lot of introspection, prodding, and generally gnawing at the idea like a velociraptor gnaws on a brontosaurus bone, I took the entire first chapter of An Artificial Night, shifted it to a separate file (where it wouldn't get in the way), and started working on a new first chapter. It contains a lot of the same elements and setting-establishment themes, but is, at the same time, a very, very different beastie. This has become a pattern. Every time I start revising a book, the first chapter seems to wind up in the recycling bin.

(I am at least reasonably confident that this won't happen with Newsflesh, since it starts with rip-roaring zombie adventure, or with Chasing St. Margaret, which starts with...um...Indian food. And I'm pretty sure taking off the first chapter of Upon A Star would cause the rest of the book to stop making any sort of linear sense. So it's probably safe.)

I find this part of the process insanely annoying -- I had a perfectly good front porch on this house! I was just getting used to it! -- but also deeply gratifying, because I have yet to build a new porch that isn't substantially better than the old porch. Plus, it gives me the excuse to really go to town with the chainsaw, and I always love that.

(Editing viciously and with little concern for life or limb, machete. Editing carefully, with surgical care and precision, scalpel. Editing in a way that leaves women weeping, strong men sick to their stomachs, and entire chapters broken and bleeding on the road to editorial perfection, chainsaw. I don't get to use the chainsaw very often. It is not an instrument for small adjustments. The chainsaw does not forgive authorial weakness. The chainsaw does not care. I love the chainsaw.)

I should be finished with the new porch by the end of today, and I'm just sort of amazed, because it's so very clearly a better porch, and it's so very clearly the porch we needed, and yet? I really thought the old porch was the right one.

It's a funny old game, writing.

...sitting down at your computer to find yourself informed, gleefully, that the complete technical reconstruction of the computer storage and wireless equipment used by the protagonists of your zombie political thriller has become the weekend project of two of the biggest hardware gurus you know. Oh, and a veterinarian is attacking your animal action sequences, and there's a pharmacologist on-call to check your medical technology.

I have the best subject-matter experts in the universe.

I would make a comment about needing a good virologist about now, but I already checked the functionality of the Kellis-Amberlee filovirus by several folks at the CDC, so I figure I'm probably doing okay in that department. I love the CDC. My friend Shawn constantly worries that they're going to start tapping my phone looking for signs that I'm planning to destroy the human race with genetically modified smallpox, but that's okay; everybody needs a hobby. And I already have several political junkies, a few news junkies, and at least six zombie experts on-call.

(This includes me. I practically have a PhD in the living dead. Again, everybody needs a hobby.)

This is going to be the most fun book revision process ever.

I've been sick for over a week now. There have been a few flashes of feeling better, but they've been short-lived, and always seem to be followed by things like last night, where I woke up at one o'clock in the morning feeling like I'd been gargling flesh-eating alien spiders. (I wasn't. At least, I don't think I was. If I'm wrong, I suppose we'll find out when they hatch. Also, it should be noted that Brooke supports my theory that alien spiders are responsible for many of the ills of mankind, although this may be because she thinks it's cool. She's right.)

Sadly, the ongoing construction of a tiny viral empire inside my body has left me with the laser-like focus of an eight-week-old cocker spaniel puppy. I can focus on small things, like peeling an egg or inking a single line. Larger things, like folding my laundry or excavating the bedroom floor? Not so much. My room has achieved a level of trashed previously known only in myth and legend. I simply lack the energy to deal with it. All I've eaten today is a cup of sugar-free Jello and some egg whites, because nothing else has any real interest in staying down. I am, in short, being punished for my sins by an angry plague-based god.

Despite my illness, I've been industriously processing edits, which is good, since otherwise, I think they would crush me beneath their weight. I think there may be a ground war over my opinions on comma usage sometime soon. I support this notion, because it would be funny. We've hit the stage where they're almost entirely pedantic things, like 'you have broken another obscure rule of grammar whose existence you never really considered before, but which will be used to sentence you to an eternity of torment if you don't fix it right now' and 'you spelled 'Rayseline' wrong.' This is the most pleasant stage of editing. The stage where I can actually fix things with relative ease.

I managed to get a good start on one of the drop-in chapters for Newsflesh on Friday, to my surprise and delight. Georgia Mason is one of the easiest point-of-view characters I've ever worked with -- most of them take a few pages or even a chapter to come all the way 'on', but she was there, and absolutely herself, from the very first paragraph. She's not the easiest person to live with, mind you, but she's an absolute ball to write for. Even if I do need to regularly restrain myself from going off on six-page rants about the state of virological research in her version of modern America. Depending on the density of editing to be done, I may be able to finish the first drop-in chapter tonight, get it all integrated with the rest of the text, and start in on drop-in chapter number two. Progress is exciting!

Of course, it's also likely that I'm going to crawl home tonight, fall on my head, and not acknowledge the world again until Tuesday morning. Because Martian Death Flu is also exciting.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee.

Today, I begin doing the major surgical adjustments to A Local Habitation. This is, honestly, one of my favorite parts of the writing process. The book is done -- for certain values of 'done' -- and I can see the entire shape of it, all stretched out upon my screen like a patient etherized upon a table. Now I can start determining which of its major organs it really doesn't need, which ones can be easily extracted, and which ones need a little more beefing up. It's a really rewarding period in the evolution of the text.

I managed to get some work done on Lycanthropy yesterday -- not as much as I would have done on, say, a day when I wasn't down with Martian death flu, but since I'm sick, and a next-day review of the text has shown it to be pretty darn good, I'm a happy girl. Clady is just plain fun to write for. I can't wait until everyone else gets to meet her.

Also on the happy-happy joy-joy side of things, when I finish the surgical adjustments to A Local Habitation and send it off, I should be able to take a month or so off from playing in Toby's backyard to address the changes I've been wanting to make in Newsflesh. Because everything is better with zombies. Even chocolate chip cookies. And since I have steadfastly refused to allow my love for the living dead to insert them into any of my other ongoing series (except for Deathless, but that's a special case, given my protagonist), I figure I deserve a little bit of a zombie break. ZOMBIE BREAK!!!!!

Life is good. There's so much writing to be done!

I've finished the first pass-through on A Local Habitation! Yes! Every chapter has been smacked with the editorial machete of Bringing Things Into Line With The Final Submitted Version of Rosemary and Rue! Now, this doesn't mean that it's done, submission-ready, ready for print, or anything fancy like that...

...but it does mean that I'm done with the really heavy lifting, and can start worrying about the pacing, the flow, the subtle points of continuity, and the fact that I somehow made it through multiple drafts of the book without noticing that I had a car suddenly materialize twenty-six chapters in. Win!

As I am still too sick to die, I will retreat with my triumph to update my continuity guide.

So I'm back from BayCon! And to celebrate, I've managed to come down with the most boring case of con-crud ever experienced. Seriously, I feel like hell, I haven't got the energy to pry the cat out of my dresser drawer (which is really for the best, since when she's shedding on my clean tank tops, she's not interfering with my attempts to process edits), and although I really need to go to the post office, I'd really rather sit here and hope someone will put me out of my misery.

But the con was awesome.

I've been a regular on the 'Sex Lies and Publishing' panel for years, discussing what it takes to get published and what people are willing to do if it seems likely to get them published. Last year, when I was BayCon's Toastmistress, I turned to the moderator and asked if a book contract came in my gift basket. And this year, I got to be on the panel from the other side of things! Very surreal, and very cool.

I got the chance to chat with several other authors working with DAW, including two who share my editor. So that was simply fabulous, both from a business standpoint and from the 'oh, wow, this still isn't a dream' side of things. So much fun!

My concert went fabulously, as always, thanks to the hard work of my many, many musical co-conspirators. I'll doubtless talk about this more later, but for right now, big thanks to Paul Kwinn, Tony Fabris, Michelle Dockrey, Maya Bohnhoff, Beckett Gladney, Kristoph Klover, and Jeff Bohnhoff (who wasn't in the show, but helped a lot with some of the arrangements). It's been pointed out to me again that no matter how in love I am with new material, I should really include some of the stuff on my CDs in my live shows. My protests that people can buy the songs on the CDs continue to fall on deaf ears. Si-igh.

It was a great weekend, my lovely viral infestation notwithstanding. Welcome to all the new folks who have swung by here in the past week, and while I'd promise to ramble less when not sick, I'd be lying.

When I write a book, I generally start with, well, text. After which, I poke the text with a stick until I'm sure it won't decide to eat somebody, and pass it off to my first tier of proofreaders (called, imaginatively enough, 'Tier One'). Tier One is normally five to eight people; they're selected from a small pool of prior proofers who have proven good at handling my specific first draft follies. Tier Two gets the text when it gets finished for the first time. It's about the same size as Tier One, and tends to be a little more vicious. Tier Three combines Tier One and Tier Two, along with about five new people. Yes, I have a large proofing pool. (No, I'm not looking for more -- these are people I know through a variety of channels, some of whom are in writer's groups with me, others of whom have just proven very, very good at what they do. What they do often involves grenades.)

I'm always fascinated by the way different people approach the editing process. I know authors who don't let anyone see anything until the book is finished for the first time. Authors who hit a single chapter eighty times before moving on to the next one -- they may be slow, but dude, when they finish a book, it is finished. Me, I tend to run as fast as I can from one end to the other, editing and correcting as I go, and throwing chunks of text to the wolves as frequently as I can.

Right now, I'm processing edits to A Local Habitation provided by Mary, who has developed a vendetta against the British comma. Seriously, she's like some sort of twisted naturalist, stalking them through the wild paragraphs, and clubbing them to death like baby harp seals whenever they're stupid enough to come into her sight. I'm afraid she's going to start taking shots at me. She's also going to war against my tendency to insert semi-colons wherever I can swing it. This is why I love Mary so very, very dearly. Also why I will never actually let her near me with a red pen.

I have about five stacks of edits to process after this (gulp), and then it's on to the denouement, which will hopefully do me a favor and not hit me like a ton of bricks. Ah, editing. Ah, criticism. Ah, snark.

What are your feelings on editing? How much is too much -- and how mean is too mean?