Current stats:

Words: 6,948.
Total words: 10,038.
Reason for stopping: it's time to get ready to go out, and I haven't eaten.
Music: my Newsflesh playlist, which needs to be updated, but still mostly applies.
Lilly: in and out of the room all morning long.

So Friday night, I said 'I am going to hit ten thousand words on The Mourning Edition this weekend,' because I am sometimes a cocky little brat. And indeed, it is now late Sunday morning, and I started writing at seven AM, and I have just hit ten thousand words on The Mourning Edition. Sometimes, cockiness comes with certain undeniable rewards.

I realized after finishing what I thought was chapter one that I had, in fact, written the second half of chapter two and the first half of chapter three; it's good text, but it's not a beginning, it's a middle, and this needs to be an entirely new book. That's okay, because writing it to begin with had managed to shift me into the right mindset for a party with the Masons, and the new chapter one came just as sweet and smooth as silk. I am utterly pleased.

Assuming this book keeps true to the pattern of the first in the series, I am approximately one-seventeenth of the way through my first draft. I can basically live with that.

I love my zombies. They make it better.

Current stats:

Words: 3,090.
Total words: 0.
Reason for stopping: need to eat dinner before I eat the cat.
Music: mostly Children of Eden and Dr. Horrible.
Lilly: nowhere to be seen, which should probably worry me.

How do you know I'm in the middle of editing three books and feeling the specter of free time looming over me in a dark and spooky fashion? I start a new book, of course. (Honestly, I should probably have been spending the time working on Lycanthropy, but as I spent the entire day at a funeral, I think I can be excused a little cathartic zombie-time.)

It took a little thought to really figure out how to slide back into the dark, slightly twisted dystopia inhabited by the Mason twins and the Kellis-Amberlee virus (coming soon to a CDC installation near you!), but once I got the rhythm back, I got it back. I blinked and it had been ten pages and a couple of thousand words. Not that three thousand words means much when the first book finished at roughly 150,000, but hey, every little bit counts.

I love my zombies. They make it better.

I've been editing Feed for the past several days. It is thus, perhaps unsurprising that my Gmail's targeted advertising currently thinks it should be trying to sell me zombies. That being said?

I am not in a very good mindset to have the news box at the top of my email announce 'WARNING: ZOMBIE OUTBREAK' when I load my inbox.

I'm just saying, maybe the people who do this targeted advertising stuff should pause and consider whether telling their system to go ahead and pick up on certain key words will cause the recipients of those targeted ads to start scrambling for their emergency zombie survival kits and scaring the folks around them. And that maybe, they should further consider that if those recipients were to, say, take a machete to someone who happened to be walking a little funny, they might try launching a frivolous lawsuit. 'But Officer, Gmail swore that there were zombies!'

Maybe.

In other news, I have resumed breathing.

Hello, and welcome to my journal! I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire, and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions that I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets reposted every time the answers change, and to let new people know how we roll around here. (I will make no more Clueless references in this post, I promise.) Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

Anyway, here you go:

( This way lies a lot of information you may or may not need about the person whose LJ you may or may not be reading right at this moment. Also, I may or may not be the King of Rain, which may or may not explain why it's drizzling right now. Essentially, this is Schrodinger's cut-tag.Collapse )

Updated book stats:

Total words: 149,220.
Previous words: 156,890.
Loss between drafts: 7,670.
Total chapters: thirty-one chapters, divided into five 'books' and a coda.
Total pages: 544 (30 page decrease).
Draft one started: September 4th, 2005, on the plane back from Seattle.
Draft one finished: December 27th, 2007, sitting at Tony's kitchen table, in Seattle.
Draft one edits finished: June 3rd, 2008, in my bedroom.
Draft two started: June 3rd, 2008, also in my bedroom.
Draft two finished: July 7th, still in my bedroom. I don't move much.

I have finished the second draft of Feed, my epic novel of zombies, politics, blogging, how George Romero accidentally saved the world and the tragic duty of the journalist. Now I get to process copy-edits and frantically jab my subject matter experts with sticks. ("Hey, you said my tech was outdated. Dude, can you tell me how? Please? Ack!")

Seriously, this book has been so much work, and there's more work to come, but wow, has it turned into something amazing. I am so very proud of this entire thing. It's huge and sprawling and epic and wonderful, and I still love it, even after hammering my head against it for all this time. Which I think is a good sign.

I love my little zombies.

So recently, I bought an issue of Maxim, only to discover that they had included their list of '200 movies everyone should see.' Naturally, I disagreed with a great many of their selections, especially the part where their horror movies seem to have been chosen through purely arbitrary measures, largely having to do with how much gore could be splattered on the screen. That doesn't work for me all that well, and so I have decided to present a better, more carefully considered list. IE, 'the horror movies I say everyone should see.'

( We cut because we care. Also because failure to cut results in a much higher bodycount, and nobody wants that. Well. I want that. But I'll be merciful.Collapse )

***

What did I miss?

Recently, I've read two books* that presented me with a very large number of supporting characters, sketched them out in two or three paragraphs at most, and then expected me to do the work of keeping track of them. In both cases, I had some difficulty fulfilling that expectation.

The first book, Fortune's Fool, is the third installment in Mercedes Lackey's Hundred Kingdoms series. The first two books in the series were fun and fluffy fairy tale remixes/romances, and didn't require me, as the reader, to do any heavy lifting. I enjoyed them both a great deal. Not the deepest books in the world, but honestly, not everything needs to be. There's a place in this world for comfort reading (hence my addiction to Meg Cabot). I borrowed the third book from Kate expecting to find myself greeted with a refreshing, uplifting, and generally unchallenging read.

Instead, I got a book where the main characters were frankly rather boring, the romance was perfunctory at best, the writing really needed to be hit with the machete a few more times, and then -- about two-thirds of the way through -- the author introduced a rapid-fire assortment of loosely-sketched minor characters, some of them with very similar names (and at least one with no name at all). Added to the already sprawling supporting cast that came with each of the main characters, and the expectation that of course the reader remembered the minor characters from the first two books, well...it became a bit much.

I'll be honest. I never did start keeping some of the minor characters distinct from one another, and I forgot pretty much all of them thirty seconds after I closed the book. Not really the best sign. Of the three, this was the one I had the highest hopes for -- she was working with some fairy tales I very much enjoy, and in a mythos that doesn't get used enough -- and the one that I'm the least likely to read again.

Meanwhile, over in Brian Keene's Dead Sea -- a messy zombie epic taking place largely on a retired Navy cruise ship, with some rather graphic and unpleasant side-trips to other, even more dangerous locations -- we also got a wide assortment of minor characters, many of them also with similar names, many of them barely introduced before they got, well, eaten by zombies (as one does). The action is fast-paced throughout, and manages to keep itself from becoming confusing, largely by dint of blowing something up whenever too many cast members assemble in one location. (Seriously. I would not want to live in one of this man's books.) But I enjoyed it, and I'll read it again. So what's the difference?

Genre is a part of it. I love zombies and fairy tales just about equally, but there's an expectation in a work of zombie fiction that you'll start with a cast that's larger than you need it to be, so that you can feed large portions of it to the living dead. You can't have a zombie movie that only has three characters on the screen and actually maintain any real feeling of menace directed towards those characters (although believe me, I've tried). In fairy tales, the really minor characters are usually either off-screen or dead. They don't get pseudo-compelling little 'oh, and that guy, the one over there, he's super-cool, but you have to hang out with these people instead' introductions before getting shoved off the page.

There's also a lot to be said about the way those incidental characters get sketched in. There's a reason it's always the rookie in the war movie -- the one with the picture of his girlfriend in his wallet -- who dies. Don't believe me? Go watch Iron Man. The soldiers in the Humvee with Tony Stark aren't the most memorable characters in the movie. They don't even have names. But people remember them. Read The Boys, by Garth Ennis. The death of Wee Hughie's girlfriend happens so early in the series that it's not even a spoiler...but wow will you remember her.

I've done my share of juggling the really minor characters, and near as I can tell, the trick is to make them compelling enough that we'll grieve for them, or forgettable enough that we'll view them as the plot conveyances they are, without forcing the reader to keep a flow chart in order to remember which magical widget every one of them is carrying. It can be hard as hell. I have full mental dossiers on every character in Toby's world, and I think they're all fascinating, and I'd love to give them all walk-on roles. But since this isn't a zombie flick, and I'm not about to feed them all to a monster, that won't work. So they come in by ones and by twos, they take a moment to be interesting, and then they either go away or become more important. Character confetti just very rarely seems to work.

Opinions?

(*I read a lot. I mean, I read a lot. Every day, I write down in my planner what I read that day, because it helps me keep track of various essential trends in my consumption of the written word. It is now June 5th, and I've read five books so far this month. This doesn't include graphic novels, because attempting to include graphic novels would probably make me cry.)