I...appear to have missed a month. Which is a little terrifying, given how careful I have reliably been about making these posts. There you go: that is how fried I was over the Hugos. Here, then, is the September 2012 current projects post. Most of the year is gone. Like, we are in the final color block of my planner, and it's terrible.

Anyway, this is the post in which I tell you what I'm working on, and you finally understand why I don't have time for tea. To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that all books currently in print are off the list, as are those that have been turned in but not yet printed (Midnight Blue-Light Special, Parasite). The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

Not everything on this list has been sold. I will not discuss the sale status of anything which has not been publicly announced. Please don't ask.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

Current stats:

Words: 115,732
Pages: 427
Chapters: thirty-five of thirty-five
Started: February 15th, 2011
Finished: February 26th, 2011

So it turns out that when I'm really focused and not working too much on anything else (largely because I knew that failure to handle my revisions would make me useless as far as finishing anything else goes), I can get from one end of the longest Toby manuscript yet to the other end in eleven days. In case I ever need to go in for land-speed trials or anything crazy like that.

My timeline is fixed; my dialogue is tighter; my blocking is clarified; some questions have been answered; some new questions have been raised. I feel much more confident in Ashes of Honor now that I think I truly understand where the ground is at the end of One Salt Sea. It's a better book than it was eleven days ago. The Machete Squad has it now; I believe it will be a better book still when they're done with it. And then I can focus on the things yet to come, like Newsflesh three, and Toby six, and InCryptid two.

Sleep is for other people. Not me, and not Toby.

But it's a book, and I'm going to bed.

In the Toby books, people tend to swear by (and on) a variety of things, including trees (oak, ash, elm, yarrow, pine), representative symbols for fae ideals (root, branch, rose, thorn), and the three major monarchs of their world. Brooke, being seized by an imp of the perverse one day, went through and actually made a list of all the times people swear by one of the monarchs...and what body parts they swore by.

My proofreaders are special, yo.

So here, for your enlightenment, is the cussin', as listed by Brooke, who is insane.

A CHILD'S GARDEN OF ROYAL FAE SWEARING

Swearing by Oberon:

In Oberon's name (Rosemary and Rue)
Oberon's bones (R&R)
Oberon's blessed balls (A Local Habitation)
Oberon's blood (R&R, An Artificial Night)
Oberon's teeth (ALH, AAN)
Sweet Oberon (Late Eclipses)
Oberon's hairy balls (LE)
Oberon's honor (LE)
Oberon's ass (LE, The Brightest Fell)
Oberon's balls (R&R, ALH, AAN, LE)

Swearing by Titania:

Titania wept (AAN)
Titania's teeth (AAN)
Sweet Titania (AAN, LE, TBF)
Titania's bones (LE)
Titania's rose (LE)

Swearing by Maeve:

Sweet Lady Maeve (RR)
Maeve's tits (ALH,TBF)
In the name of Maeve (AAN)
By the boon of Maeve (AAN)
Maeve's bones (RR, AAN, TBF)
Maeve wept (AAN)
Maeve's tree (LE)
Sweet Maeve (LE)
I swear to Maeve I'll shoot you (LE)
Maeve's teeth (RR, AAN, LE, TBF)

Swearing is fun!

Behold! For now I wear the human pants! I have finished processing the editorial notes on Late Eclipses, gone through the book end-to-end to make sure everything still makes sense, and finished processing the corrections in Vixy's gloriously detailed machete file. Then I packed it a lunch and sent it off to play with the Machete Squad, who will doubtless hack it to hell before it gets to go back to The Editor for the final time.

The current book stats:

Pages, 369.
Words, 107,372.
Chapters, thirty-seven.
Cans of DDP, oh, wow, I cannot tell you.

I'm finally happy with this book. It's in a very awkward position, because book four is sort of where you get to say "here's when shit gets real," and make people stop treating you like you're writing a trilogy (which I never was). It's a transition book, and it follows An Artificial Night, which is still my favorite in the series. But it's also better than I ever dreamt it would be, and I'm so thrilled to have watched it grow into something wonderful.

In conclusion...

...DINO DANCE PARTY!

And now it is July 15th—where the hell did the year go?!—and that means it's time for my monthly current projects post. This is the regularly scheduled update which provides the only non-hysteria-inducing answer to the question "What are you working on?" It has the extra added bonus of proving that I am able to stop time, since otherwise, even I don't quite understand how the hell I'm getting everything finished in a timely manner. Seriously, I don't think I sleep. This is the July list of current projects, because I am the gift that keeps on giving.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that all books currently in print are off the list. The second Newsflesh book (Deadline) is off the list until The Other Editor tells me otherwise. Discount Armageddon is off the list because it has been turned in to The Agent.

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

Tuesday, I realized there was something wrong with The Brightest Fell (October Daye, book five).

Wednesday, I began reworking the book from the beginning, to see if I could figure out what the problem was. Twenty pages in, I figured out what the problem was. Twenty pages after that, I came up for air.

Thursday, a package containing the page proofs for An Artificial Night landed on my doorstep, roughly four hours after the official sign-and-return contracts for Late Eclipses and The Brightest Fell landed in my hands. And to this I say...

Here we go again.

Tonight, I'm going to go home, pick up the page proofs, and decamp to the Starbucks down the street, where the combination of caffeine, iPod, and no fixed bedtime will enable me to burn through a decent number of chapters before I collapse into a twitching heap. Tomorrow, I'll get out of bed, take my walk to the 7-11 (land of "it's exactly a mile and a half round-trip"), and get back to work on The Brightest Fell. By the end of the weekend, I expect to be at least eighty pages into both manuscripts.

Toby's world is one that's very familiar to me, and very welcoming, because I've spent so much time there. At the same time, The Brightest Fell has been a challenge—it's resolving a lot of things that should make people very happy—while An Artificial Night remains my favorite of the first three, and thus needs to be as bad-ass as possible. So, you know. No pressure or anything.

But gee, it's nice to be running away with the faeries again.

(A note: This was supposed to go up on the 9th, but I got distracted by banana slugs, Canadians, roadkill, and my mother. We'll be resuming the normal posting dates after today's interjection. Sorry for the confusion)

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 (also known as Mira Grant), and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets updated and re-posted roughly every two months, to let folks who've just wandered in know how things work around here. Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

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 )

As it is March 15th, marking the middle of the month and the defeat of my sanity, it's time for me to make my monthly current projects post. This is the post wherein I prove to the curious that I either don't sleep or have access to some mechanism for stopping time (don't I wish). There's a reason I start to giggle and twitch whenever someone asks me "What are you working on?", and this post provides a bit of explanation. It also serves as something I can point to when the question gets asked, which it does. This is the March list of current projects, because I am the gift that keeps on giving.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that the first two Toby books (Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation) are off the list because they are now in print. Feed is off the list because it is in the process of being printed, and it's too late for me to make changes of any kind. The third and fourth Toby books (An Artificial Night and Late Eclipses) are off the list until The Editor tells me otherwise. Discount Armageddon and Deadline are off the list because they have been turned in to The Agent.

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

I'm a writer. I've been a writer for as long as I've had a grasp of written language, although my earliest works were, admittedly, not all that complex. I get asked "when did you start writing?" pretty commonly in interviews, and my response is always something along the lines of "I have no idea, in the womb, maybe, I don't know." Because really, I don't.

So as we continue our countdown (five days! Sweet pumpkin pie, five days!), here's today's list:

5 Reasons I Love Writing.

5. Stephen King put it best when he said that writing is like a form of telepathy. I make things up, I write them down, and then you can see them, in your mind. You "hear" dialog that I wrote. You "meet" people that I invented. When I write, I am Emma Frost, and that is awesome.

4. Writing continually surprises me. No matter how long I do it, no matter how much time I spend working to improve, I still find myself staring at things on the page and going "whoa, where did that come from?"

3. Writing comes with a very concrete and visible reward for hard work. If I write 2,000 words, I have 2,000 words that I didn't have before. If I write a book, dude, there is now a book in the world that didn't exist before I started typing. Me! I made that! It's incredibly fulfilling. Very few things in life are this immediately fulfilling.

2. I have to work to write. It's my hobby and what I do to relax and it makes me happy, but it's also work. If I don't revise, edit, check my spelling, check my continuity, and basically do hard labor, I don't get good books. I feel like I've done something when a story is finished, and that's amazing.

1. When I'm writing, I make all the rules. I don't think there's anything better than that.

Beware the ides of...well, every month around here, since that's when I make my monthly current projects post. Since it is now September 15th, it's time for me to demonstrate once again that George R.R. Martin may not be your bitch, but I just may be. (This is also the post that explains why the question "What are you working on?" sometimes causes me to burst into tears and point vaguely toward my Livejournal, as if actually saying it out loud would break the spell, wake the princess, and call down the demons.) Anyway, this is the September list of current projects, because I am the gift that keeps on giving.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that the first three Toby books are currently off this list, because they have been finished and turned in. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] now. A Local Habitation will be returning to the list briefly in the near future, when my page proofs arrive, but will then be disappearing again to prepare for publication. The fourth Toby book, Late Eclipses, is off the list because it has been finished, and is in the hands of The Editor, having been formally sent the hell away.

The first Mason book, Feed (formerly Newsflesh), is off the list because it has been revised and turned in to The Other Editor. Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching.

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

So I'm in the middle of a super-fast clean-and-jerk on Feed, before I kick it back to my editor. I'm processing comments tonight, and just got this little beauty from Brooke, referring to my tendency to occasionally lean on unnecessary modifiers:

"LARGELY. I wish to efficiently move you on a collision-free path to AN ALLIGATOR'S GULLET."

I love my proofers. I love them so hard.

That is all.

* Pick up Canadian currency from my bank, where hopefully, no one will say "Canadians have money?" Once was funny. Twice may well be grounds for punching somebody in the nose. I like my bank. I don't want to get thrown out for assaulting a teller.

* Revise and process the editorial notes on the next thirty pages of Feed. I'm currently on page 251 of 544 (this includes the dedication page, but does not yet include the acknowledgment page); I need to hit page 281 before I can go to bed tonight. I like sleep. Sleep is my cuddly friend. I like zombies. The fact that zombies are a prerequisite for sleep around here probably says something about my psyche.

* Attempt to unearth my dresser from beneath the epic pile of crap that accompanied me home from San Diego. This may or may not be something I can accomplish without the use of a flamethrower.

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Attempt to integrate the epic pile of crap that accompanied me home from San Diego into my bedroom without causing some sort of avalanche or otherwise hitting critical mass and opening a black hole into another dimension. Of course, if the objects responsible for opening the black hole influence the dimension on the other side, it will be a dimension filled with flesh-eating My Little Ponies and telepathic velociraptors. So that might be a nice place to have a vacation home.

* Trade the July pages in my planner for the shiny, new, relatively unmarked September pages. Immediately start filling the September pages with to-do lists, deadlines, goals, and the other unavoidable roadmaps of being me. I actually find this process quite soothing, in a nit-picky, obsessive sort of a way. Here is my month. I have scheduled panic attacks, showers, and laundry. Go me.

* Finish chapter four of The Brightest Fell, aka "the fifth Toby book," aka "well, at least she won't be done with the entire second trilogy before the first book comes out." (The Toby books aren't really trilogies. It's just that I tend to outline them three at a time, because it's an easy number to deal with, and people are less frightened by "oh, I'm working on the second trilogy." Apparently, math and logic are not always our friends.)

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Inform Alice that I am not going to fish the cat toys out from under the bed a third time.

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Pull my towering stacks of trade paperbacks into one mega-stack and put the damn things away before I lose a cat beneath a pile of Hack/Slash. Since Lilly eats comic books, this would be a fitting end, but it would make me sad, and I don't have time for that right now.

* Update three entries in the Toby continuity wiki. I'm getting close to being done with the data-entry from the original continuity guide, and that means soon, I'll be able to start updating things to match current continuity, as well as adding extra information on characters whose profiles are still just skeletons. If there's ever a fan wiki, we can have a race.

* Ignore the Maine Coon telling me that her toys have disappeared under the bed.

* Go to Dairy Queen.

* Sleep.

There are a lot of ways to edit. Mostly, I edit on the computer, feeding drafts to my dedicated pool of machete-wielding psychopaths and trusting them to give me back something bloody, beaten, and better than it began. I also do a lot of my own rewriting, but like so many, I've "gone green," working almost entirely in the virtual world. It's not uncommon for a book to make it through multiple drafts without ever existing in a physical form. Not bad for a girl whose first two books were written entirely on typewriter, huh? (And no, you can't read them.)

Sometimes, though, the damage is too deep, and you need to take a new approach to making things not be broken. That's where the red-line edits come in. I have printed a copy of Late Eclipses—yes, the entire multi-hundred page epic—and am now going through it chapter by chapter with the red pen. It's fascinating. Passive voice and wishy-washy modifiers fall before the tide of crimson ink like trees going down before a particularly dedicated logging crew. Things that looked just fine on the screen make me cringe when I see them on paper. And then I fix them. Because I can.

There are definite limitations to the red-line process, not the least of which is "you have to carry whatever it is you're working on." But I gotta say, when I get to this particular level of nit-picky correction, where it feels like the book is winning, it's nice to know that I have a dark alley to lure the text unsuspectingly down. And in that alley, I have a brick. A brick made entirely of red ink and causing pain.

Sometimes my taste in metaphors worries me. But my manuscript looks like it's been the victim in a low-budget slasher film, so I really don't care.

Hello, and welcome to the thirtieth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. Thirty! That's a pretty big number, and it's just set to get bigger, since all these essays are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing. (On the plus side, this also means we're sixty percent of the way there.) Here's our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #30: Continuity Trapper Keeper.

This is definitely one of those that needs a little expansion before it starts making sense. Here you go:

If you're writing any sort of series, whether it be a series of short stories or a series of novels, you need a continuity guide. The format is up to you. The level of detail is up to you. But believe me, even if you somehow manage to forget that your hero has green eyes and turn them hazel, your readers won't, and they will eat your soul.

When I was a kid, I found continuity errors unbelievably offensive. If I could always remember your main character's favorite sandwich, childhood pet, and preferred route to the spooky old house on the top of the hill, why couldn't you, the author, remember the same things? You created them!

Ah, the innocence of youth. Let's talk continuity, why it matters, and how to maintain it. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on continuity tracking.Collapse )

Okay, follow the timeline with me here for a moment. On July 2nd, 2008, I started a major revision of Late Eclipses of the Sun, aka, "Toby Daye, book four." On December 15th, 2008, I gave it to my agent for review...and on January 15th of this year I started a second major revision, because the book had some issues, and those issues could only be solved through the application of more machete. Much, much more machete.

Last night, on the plane somewhere between Michigan and California, I typed "the end" once more, closed the file, and called it good. The current book stats:

Pages, 389.
Words, 107,089.
Chapters, thirty-five.
Cans of DDP, beyond counting.

Please compare these to the book stats before I started my revision:

Pages, 417.
Words, 115,310.
Chapters, thirty-six.

Oh, and did I mention that—at one point during the revision process—the book managed to swell to a high-water mark of approximately 118k? Yeah. This was a book in need of some serious surgery, and now that the surgery has been performed, I can look at the manuscript and not feel like a match would improve it immensely. (I have a real love/hate relationship with my work. I love it while I'm creating it. I love it six months after it's finished. Immediately after it's finished, I would really love to set it on fire.) At some point during the revision, even the book's name got tighter, becoming Late Eclipses and skipping that whole "sun" thing entirely.

So now I'm tossing my innocent manuscript into the wolverine pit with my hungrily slavering initial readers, who will gut it and play hackysack with its kidneys for a little while; then I'll send it off to The Agent, and resume prodding at The Brightest Fell, aka, "Toby Daye, book five," aka, "Seanan, honey, can we please wait for Rosemary and Rue to come out before you finish the second set of three?"

In conclusion...

...DINO DANCE PARTY!

Dear Great Pumpkin;

I have continued to be a very good girl in the days since I last wrote to you. I have provided places for tired people to sleep, liquids for thirsty people to drink, and food for hungry people to eat. I have shared my ice cream and my candy corn. I did not spike the liquids for the thirsty people with interesting poisons. I have purchased and erected a cat tree so virulently orange that it sears the eyes of the unbelievers. I have not summoned the elder gods from their eternal dreaming. I have not purchased a chainsaw. Also, the swine flu isn't my fault. So clearly, I have been on my very best behavior for quite some time now.

Today, Great Pumpkin, I am asking for the following gifts:

* Freedom from typos, printing errors, and other plagues of the written word. Please, Great Pumpkin, guide my red pen through my page proofs and allow me to present Rosemary and Rue as the best book that it can possibly be. Please let all the errors be mine, and let them be reasonably small ones, so that I won't be forced to throw myself on my own machete. That would make me sad. Also, that would be messy.

* Wonderful author appearances, following a fantastic convention season. DucKon is approaching fast, Great Pumpkin, and so is the San Diego Comic Convention, which I'm going to be attending in full-on Disney Halloween Princess-mode. After that comes WorldCon in Montreal, and after that...after that, my book comes out, and I'm doing signings and raffles and all sorts of other things, many of them for the first time. Help me represent the orange, black, and green with honor, with dignity, and without overdosing on candy corn.

* Continued health for my cats. I have to admit, Great Pumpkin, you came through big time with that whole "perfect kitten" thing that I asked you for. I was dubious at first, since "Maine Coon" and "Siamese" are not the same thing, but Alice is amazing, and has won Lilly over completely, which is really what matters. (And if you think I don't know you had a hand in this, you're out of your gourd. So to speak. Betsy hasn't had a blue in years, and don't think I missed those smoky orange undertones. You are a very cunning supernatural force. I bow before the sanctity of your patch.)

* The perfect house for Newsflesh, wherein the Mason twins deal with politics, the Internet, blogging, dead stuff, each other, and their completely insane co-workers as efficiently and politely as possible. "Polite" usually means "with bullets and bitching." If you give me this, Great Pumpkin, I promise you at least three more short stories featuring the Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad, and another Velveteen adventure involving the denizens of Halloween. If you give me a trilogy sale, I'll actually do the origin stories for Hailey and Scaredy.

* A lack of total meltdown over this swine flu thing. I know it's not the slatewiper pandemic, Great Pumpkin, because you would never do that to me this close to my first book's release date. So clearly, this is just a minor plague, meant to remind the world that we need to wash our hands more often. Please let people remember to wash their hands and cover their mouths and take deep breaths (okay, maybe not that last one), so that we can get through this without anybody setting anybody else on fire.

* My galleys. Please let them come today, Great Pumpkin, as my twitchiness is beginning to bother people. I think some of them are becoming concerned that I may destroy the planet in a fit of pique, and frankly, I share their concern. Please, Great Pumpkin, help me to leave enough of the world's population alive to properly honor you on the next Halloween.

I remain your faithful Halloween girl,
Seanan.

PS: You did an amazing job with the cover thing. Thank you so much.

Time once again for my favorite semi-regular feature, Horrible Things What Seanan's Proofreaders Say To Her. Today's special guest star is Brooke, taking us for a tour of her wonderful, terrible lagoon with the following gems.

* "Sort of" and "real" need to have a totally hot double date together in the wishy-washy modifier bistro, which is way more romantic than this sentence. Hop in, guys! Alligatormousine will take you right there! Chop chop! Cupid awaits!

* This digression is mildly boring. Toby is bored because she's bad at it, but not the kind of bored where she starts fights, so I'm bored too.

* Needs a serving of Pronoun-Aid, The Handy Kitchen Helper That Clarifies While-U-Wait.

* That would be a really affecting sentence except for how it starts with almost. ALMOST! ALLIGATOR AQUACISE HOUR! 10% discount when you sign up for two classes at the Lagoon fitness center!

Bless you, Brooke, for the way you abuse me. Also, I suggest you lock the doors tonight before you go to bed. I know where you sleep.

Me: I believe I shall revise this chapter.
LE: I believe I shall kick your ass.
Me: I'm the author, I get to win.
LE: *chuckles evilly*

(Eighty pages and a lot of profane language later, there's blood on the ceiling, and slaughtered adjectives litter the carpet like, um, thingy.)

Me: I HATE YOU SO HARD.
LE: I'm better now.
Me: ...what?
LE: I'm a better book now.
Me: ...why the hell couldn't you cooperate if this was the end result?
LE: Because it's more fun this way.

(Cue more insensate swearing. Fade to black.)

In other news, work on the fourth Toby book continues apace -- yes, I'm aware that the first book doesn't come out until September; remember, my life goals include "turn in the second trilogy by the end of 2010," because that's just the way I roll -- and is only causing me small amounts of severe physical, mental, and emotional trauma. I'm busting ass now, while I can, before the promo for Rosemary and Rue kicks into such high gear that I don't have brain anymore.

Late Eclipses has lost three words from its title, four thousand words from its text, and two chapters from its numbering system, and it's better for these subtractions. It is gradually becoming a lean, mean, causing-me-pain machine.

Now, television, tuna sandwiches, art card inking, and the eventual sleep of the just. Good night, y'all. Don't burn down the internet.

I am currently engaged in a truly fascinating dance of projects. I'm writing The Mourning Edition (sequel to Newsflesh) and Discount Armageddon (first of the Incryptid books). I'm doing a full revamp and revision of Late Eclipses of the Sun (October Daye, book four) at the same time, preparatory to getting back to work on The Brightest Fell (October Daye, book five). Each of these projects is filling an important niche in my mental ecosystem, since they're different enough that I don't get them confused, and they refresh me in different ways.

Right now, my writing regiment looks like this:

* Day one, revise/rewrite a chapter of Late Eclipses.
* Day two, start a chapter of The Mourning Edition.
* Day three, finish the chapter of The Mourning Edition, process edits on Late Eclipses.
* Day four, revise/rewrite a chapter of Late Eclipses.
* Day five, start a chapter of Discount Armageddon, process edits on The Mourning Edition.
* Day six, finish the chapter of Discount Armageddon, process edits on Late Eclipses.
* Day seven, revise/rewrite a chapter of Late Eclipses...

...and I bet you can catch the pattern from there. In amidst all this madness, I'm answering email, writing blog entries, finishing essays, doing book reviews, working on my website, detailing art cards, finishing comic strips, doing random pieces of promotional art, and, of course, sleeping. I've also been watching an average of twenty hours of television per week.

Yes, we think I steal time from a parallel dimension.

Writing something new is always exciting, but right now, it's the revision of Late Eclipses that really fascinates me. I have the shape of things entirely in place; I know who's where, when they get there, and what they need to do. Now I'm patching the logic problems, fixing the bits that seem out of character or don't make sense, and generally having a lovely time wading through my own world. (If it seems odd that I'd be having logic problems, consider the fact that by book four, I have roughly twelve hundred pages of continuity that needs to be acknowledged and worked with in order for things to make sense. It's both freeing and confining. Much like a really good corset, which gives you excellent support, but makes eating a big lunch a bad idea.)

A lot of things are coming clear to me as I work on this book, and I'm really starting to think that my second trilogy is going to be made of awesome. Which is good. I sort of lose the ability to gauge the quality of my own work after a certain number of revisions -- I don't see the clever, I just see the commas -- so I really enjoy these moments where I stop, and blink, and go 'hey, wait, this is good!'

Busy blonde is busy, but busy blonde is happy, and that helps a lot.

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-fourth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. We're almost halfway through the original set of fifty thoughts on writing, which is a slightly awe-inspiring thought if I think about it too hard. These essays will eventually touch on as many aspects of the art of writing as I can think of, and may occasionally seem to be self-contradictory. Writing is like that.

Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #24: Revise or Die.

Now, those of you who have been following this series may look at today's topic and find yourselves scratching your heads. 'But wait,' you might say, 'wasn't essay twenty-three about revision?' You'd be right. Because here's the thing: we're going to be circling back to editing, revision, and critique quite a bit as this essay series goes on. It's that important. Which brings us to today's expanded topic:

Anyone who tells you that your first draft is brilliant, perfect poetry and deserves to be published just as it is and you shouldn't change a word and oh, you're going to be famous and make enough money to buy a desert island is either a) lying, b) delusional, or c) your mother.

Does it seem like I'm harping on this? That's because I am, a bit. We all have cheerleaders. We all have people who believe, truly and deeply, that we are the perfect special snowflakes to end all perfect special snowflakes, and that because we are perfect special snowflakes, we need a constant stream of validation, love, and affirmation, because otherwise we might melt. Those are wonderful people. Those are important people. And sometimes, those are the people we need to listen to the least.

We're all special snowflakes. We all need to turn on the heat. Ready? Excellent. Now let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on the art of revision, take two.Collapse )

Welcome back! It's time to call class back into session for the twenty-third essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. (Really, it's all just an excuse for me to eat a lot of apples and claim to be spelunking for worms, but don't mind me.) We are now almost halfway through what will eventually be a series of fifty essays, all of them based on my fifty thoughts on writing. If you missed an earlier essay, never fear; they're all linked from the 'fifty thoughts' post as they're finished.

Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #23: Embrace Revision.

I think we've all been tempted to say 'the first draft is good enough' and move on to something new, rather than going through the often-painful process of trying to edit our way down to the heart of the matter. Many of us may have managed to get away with it a time or two...or even twenty, in the case of high school and college-level creative writing classes. Which brings us to today's expanded topic:

For the sweet love of all that is holy, edit, proofread, revise, and practice the art of self-critique. I mean it. There is no one on this planet so good at this game that they can just throw a fistful of words at the page and declare it brilliant. Needing to revise does not make you a failure, and becoming a better writer isn't going to take that need away. Embrace the revision process as a chance to dig down into the heart of your text and make it everything that it deserves to be.

Revision is a huge and tangled topic, as is revision's sister, editing. Some people will argue that a really good writer doesn't actually need to edit or revise; a really good writer will always get it right the very first time. While it's true that writers will get better with practice -- writing is a skill like any other, and even those who start out with more raw talent than others will improve or decline according to how much they work at it -- you're never going to meet a writer who has improved to the point that they no longer need to review their work.

So there it is; that's what we're going to be talking about today. Ready? Excellent. Now let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on the art of revision.Collapse )

So I haven't been posting many word counts recently -- not, as one person jokingly asked, because I've given up writing in favor of playing Kingdom Hearts for the fifteenth time, but because I've entered one of those phases where the word counts are somewhat less quantifiable. If I start out with a file containing 50,000 words, and finish with a file containing 51,000 words, I've clearly written 1,000 words, right? Well, what if, in the process of working that day, I deleted an entire chapter, replaced it with a new chapter, and rewrote three fight sequences? I actually wrote 11,000 words. My net gain, however, is 1,000. And how do you measure revisions? Sometimes I'll spend six hours of quality time with a manuscript and a machete, and come away bleeding, grinning, and down a couple of thousand words. Negative word counts seem a little silly in that situation. I wind up just waving my hands around in the air and saying, blankly, 'lots.'

I've actually been busting ass around here lately. Discount Armageddon got a whole new first chapter, as did Late Eclipses of the Sun; in the case of Discount Armageddon, the original first chapter stayed on as the new second chapter, but in the case of Late Eclipses, well...kill your darlings. I've said it often enough that I really do need to learn how to live by it. I've also done some serious restructuring on the rest of Discount Armageddon, making it tighter, leaner, and much more prepared to dance the samba all over whatever happens to get in its way.

Late Eclipses is going through a similar, but much more dramatic, series of restructurings; several large swaths of the book are being tossed out the window and completely rewritten, including, so far, the original chapters one and two. (One of the other things I say way too often to plead ignorance: the author can be wrong, and that's what rewrites are for.) The story is still essentially the same, it's just getting tighter and more directed in the things that it's saying. That, and I'm slaughtering a lot of wishy-washy modifiers. They're like kittens -- one is awesome, thirty is a crazy cat lady.

I'm just about finished working on Discount Armageddon for a little while, since it's a busy book with places to go and people to see. This is going to mean the return of the word counts for The Mourning Edition, as I get back to work on my favorite zombie universe, and probably the beginning of the editorial revisions on An Artificial Night.

In short, even when it looks like I'm goofing off and having fun with art supplies, I'm working too much to sleep.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.

The cast of my personal reality show (So You Want To Edit One of Seanan's Novels?, hosted by Jane, the alcoholic muse who's probably going to get a spin-off on VH1 one of these days) tends to rotate -- not because we kick people off the island, but because editing for me can be a fairly time-consuming experience. Folks who watch me blog periodically comment on how many things I seem to be doing at one time. People who edit for me know how many things I seem to doing at one time, because they're expected to critique them. All of them. At my idea of 'a reasonable speed.' And since I write like the bastard daughter of Quicksilver and Mother Goose, my idea of 'a reasonable speed' is not like your Earth ideas.

I am enormously appreciative of all my readers, editors, and proofreaders (and yes, these are three very different things, although some folks wear more than one hat). Right now, I'm being enormously appreciative of Lu, who had to leave for a few books to go off and have a life -- I know, right? -- but is now back in the saddle and scolding me viciously for my first draft tendency to hit people upside the head with two-by-fours when I'm trying to make a point. It's people like her who get me to stop hitting unless it's necessary.

Lu, this moment of sincere appreciation is for you. Because you just rock.

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 roughly every two months, 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.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

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 )

* Review the proofs for my new album, Red Roses and Dead Things. Decide that they are, yes, sufficiently steeped in mad science, horror, and awesome sauce. Return them to the printer. I should be receiving my albums on January 26th, which is what we call 'cutting it very, very close,' but will still allow me to do a formal album release at Conflikt II.

* Announce the awesomeness that is Ravens in the Library, a benefit anthology for SJ Tucker. Announce this to, among other people, my mother, who responds with an hour-long rant about the state of American medicine. I could charge admission to my mom when she's worked up about something, I swear.

* Receive edits for my Ravens in the Library story. Review the edits, and determine that yes, they're pretty much all accurate. (This is why I have people who read for me. It's a vital part of not looking like a total idiot every time I turn something in.) Life is good.

* Approach the cage where the supine form of Late Eclipses of the Sun lurks, waiting to strike. Poke a stick through the bars. The book does not respond. Rattle the stick around. The book does not respond. Unlock the cage. Suddenly get attacked by five hundred pages of snarling, possibly rabid manuscript. Decide to start work on Saturday, when I have access to a bone saw.

* Turn in some website corrections to my long-suffering, utterly fabulous web dude, Chris. (Mysteriously, Chris is setting up the new interface so that I can make certain small text changes on my own. I think, perhaps, working with the world's most obsessive editor is getting to him.) (I love you, Chris.)

* Do a lot of inking to make the items listed above less aneurysm-inducing. Because nothing says 'soothing' like three panels of cross-hatching.

What's new with you?

From the Wanlorn:

"Your love of colons is disturbing and bad."

(The Wanlorn also tends to tag my more dramatically twisted sentences with 'LOL' and 'FAIL.' Everyone should have a proofer like her. After going through one of her edit files, I am immune to all future editorial cruelty. How I adore her.)

I also have an enormous file of logic problems from Vixy, who basically attacked the entire manuscript with a giant stick marked 'this makes no sense.' Sometimes I wonder why I let her live. And then I remember that I'd be sad if she were gone.

Ah, the joys of editing.

It's time for number seventeen in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. There will eventually be fifty essays in this series, all of them based on my fifty thoughts on writing; once number fifty has been written, I'll need to find something to do with my time. Maybe I'll, I don't know, write a book or something. Not all the essays will be of use to everyone, but I'll at least attempt to make them entertaining.

Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #17: Have Faith In Your Editor.

This is actually a thought that applies to everyone who writes, whether you're doing essays for a class or trying to craft the Great American/European/Australian/Martian/Whatever Novel. It's publishing-oriented in the sense that I do believe that work intended for publication requires more extensive editing, and we'll be talking about that. It's also writing-for-fun-oriented, in the sense that we want our readers not to bludgeon us to death with trout. Here's today's expanded topic of discussion:

A good editor looks good when you look good. They're trying to help you. Listen to them. Not everyone is a good editor. After a few experiences with the bad ones, you'll learn how to recognize the difference.

It's impossible to provide the experience necessary to tell a good editor from a bad one, at least in part because that definition will vary from person to person. Sometimes the variation will be slight; other times, the variation will be large enough to become incomprehensible. So we're going to try to cover the generalities today, and more importantly, we're going to be discussing the reasons that we need to be edited at all.

Ready? Excellent. Let's get started.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on editors, being edited, and why these things are necessary.Collapse )

Well, I just finished copy-editing my friend's manuscript and returned it for review. Because I am virtuous and hard-working and industrious and stuff. (I am now awaiting the crews of trained ninja assassins and rabid pixies to burst through my bedroom windows and slaughter me, but that's another matter altogether.) As my reward, I shall go and see Bolt with my housemate. That's how we roll around here. Oh, yeah.

I'm actually quite pleased with myself. I managed to copy-edit -- lightly, but still thoroughly -- an entire manuscript, while not falling behind in my own (often self-assigned) deadlines. As I said earlier, I have some things I have to finish this weekend, but none of them have been endangered by my taking the time, so ha.

Copy-editing someone else when I spend so much time being copy-edited was interesting, because I've learned a lot of rules of grammar and punctuation without intending to; they were hammered through my admittedly thick skull through constant and occasionally angry repetition. (You'd be angry too if you'd given me the same correction fifty-seven times.) There are a lot of casual behaviors, text-wise, that are technically incorrect, but which we happily do anyway. What's interesting is that they often create a slight feeling of 'something is wrong here' when we look at those sentences in a critical fashion, yet without knowing the actual rule, we may or may not be able to articulate the actual problem. The brain is fascinating. So is the language.

...wow, that was all a little closer to 'deep thinking' than I like to be on a Saturday afternoon immediately after completing a large task. Blame it on the soda the size of my head (which is woefully now gone to the great soda fountain in the sky).

Off to the movies; don't burn down the Internet while I'm away, and I'll reward you later with my cranberry sauce recipe.

Step one: Wake up. This is the least pleasing step. I was having a very pleasant dream about attending a convention in England with my agent and most of my crew of rotating musicians. Vixy and I got to raid a Tesco's. It was nice. Waking up was so not on the agenda.

Step two: Lilly realizes that I have woken up. On weekends, I tend to stay in bed long enough for Lilly to come over and spend some time on my chest, getting heavy-duty affection directed her way. This is because I foolishly believe that if I adore her enough before I start trying to do things, she might leave me alone to do them.

Step three: Check email. Hello, email. Yes, there certainly is a lot of you, and no, none of you really appears to matter. That's always a pleasant discovery on a Saturday morning, as the last thing I want is an emergency or for an unexpected deadline to pop up and wave to me.

Step four: Stare blankly at The Brightest Fell for about three minutes. After that, decide that I am not yet in the necessary head-space to struggle with navigating those particular waters, and close the file again. (Toby Daye, book five. Because finishing four of them in a year just wasn't enough.)

Step five: Copy-edit two chapters of the manuscript I'm currently copy-editing for a friend of mine. It's on today's to-do, even: 'edit chapters 10 and 11.' I am, at this point, sufficiently engrossed by the story that I wouldn't be surprised if that turned into 'and 12 and 13 and just keep going already,' but since I also have to finish the next Velveteen vs. today, it won't go on forever.

...and now, pants, and the ceremonial Saturday morning stroll to the 7-11, hence to obtain a soda whose volume is slightly more than the volume of my skull. Because that will make me feel better.

How's your Saturday?

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 roughly every two months, 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.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

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 )

It's time for another glimpse into the marvelous mind of Brooke, where the Modifier Lagoon Resort provides a happy home for all your unwanted metaphors and wishy-washy phrasing. You know how parents tell kids that the rabid dog is now romping happily in the green grass of a farm that's very, very far away, and it can't call to tell them what a wonderful time it's having because dogs don't have thumbs? The lagoon is like that. Remember the lagoon when you need a place for your modifiers to have...fun.

Anyway, today's specific gem from the proofing mines:

* I've largely skipped a few drafts. Maybe you thought you could sneak by, largely. Maybe you thought I was largely losing my touch. Maybe you thought we'd largely gone soft on WISHY WASHY MODIFIERS. Well you're WRONG. LARGELY! LAGOON! NOW! DROP AND GIVE ME 50 GATOR-PUSHUPS!

And this, after my protagonist made a reference to Pop Tarts:

* Pseudo-pastry deserves a word-construction MEDAL. <3

So now I'm short a few modifiers, but hey, I got a medal! In a much more general sense, Brooke has a major talent for going 'this conversation makes no sense' and phrasing it in such a way that I can actually step back and find my way out of whatever logical cul-de-sac I've managed to run down this time. Brooke. Because Canadians make life better.

I have a lot of people who work very hard for me in the salt mines of my fiction, laboring under a never-ending burden of misplaced commas, inaccurate blocking, this sentence no verb, and completely missing clauses. They are all wonderful. Both by default -- volunteering to proofread for me makes them wonderful -- and in the actuality of the awesome work that they deliver. Seriously, they rock me.

And then there is Vixy.

Most of my proofreaders sleep at night confident in the knowledge that I won't begin instant-messaging them with editing questions at eight o'clock in the morning. Not Vixy. Most of my proofreaders know that there's little chance of my showing up on their doorstep demanding clarification of an editorial point. Not Vixy. She puts her life on the line every day, so that I can turn in a better book.

Every proofreader has their own strengths and weaknesses, and Vixy is, without a doubt, the single best blocker I've ever had the pleasure of working with. She always knows where everyone is standing, and has managed to catch blocking errors that required me to get out a bunch of dolls and recreate the scene. Her tireless efforts and boundless patience are so genuinely peerless and incredible that there simply aren't words for how much I appreciate them.

Plus, she harasses me if I don't finish chapters. And that's a valuable service for everyone. All hail Vixy! All hail.

1) Return home from work basically a walking swamp, due to the summer deciding to have one last party here in California. Collapse into desk chair and download heaping piles of edits rather than doing anything that actually requires coherent thought.

2) Add some pages to the new Toby Wiki, as this requires little more than cutting and pasting, at least for now. Later, this thing is going to require heaping piles of effort and thought, but right now? I cut, I paste, I format, I get bored, I wander away to do something else.

3) Perform major surgery on Late Eclipses of the Sun, slicing the events of chapter three into four equal chunks and stapling them together in a new order before covering the scars with sticky tape and glue. Discover that the chapter is way, way better this way. Grumble.

4) Try to explain the continuity changes to the cat. The cat fails to care.

5) Send the new version of Late Eclipses to my proofing list. Get antsy. Start transitioning Discount Armageddon from third person to first person. Again, discover that the text is way, way better this way. Orders of magnitude better. 'There is no possible way you were wrong about the POV change' better. Grumble more.

6) Process some minor edits to Late Eclipses, including one that points out the fact that there is no such date as April 31st.

7) Decide to go watch Eureka with the cat.

(For purposes of this post, 'post-weekend' means 'Thursday night to now.')

Well, things continue to be hectic around here, which is exactly how I like them, so I really can't complain. Since Thursday, I have...

* Finished the initial revisions on Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues. This was draft one-and-a-half, to let me fix all the continuity glitches and authorial stupid that had managed to creep in around the edges; now I'm ready to kick off draft two, during which I'll lose 10% of my hard-earned word count and hit all my characters repeatedly with a hammer. Because that's social. I'm feeling super-good about this book, and I love, love, love the fact that it's finally, blessedly finished.

* Purchased tickets to head for Seattle for my first pre-Conflikt rehearsal. Conflikt is the Pacific Northwest's own filk convention, and I'm going to be their Guest of Honor in 2009 (it's a January convention). I'm super-excited, but I'm also super-nervous. Rehearsal will make the nervousness become less while the excitement becomes more. It's a match made in heaven. Plus I get to hang out with all my awesome Seattle area friends, and that never fails to make me happy.

* Processed a bucketload of edits on Late Eclipses of the Sun, aka, 'Toby Daye book four,' aka, 'Seanan, if you just sold the first three, what the hell is wrong with you that you're working on the fourth one already?!' OCD cat is working marginally ahead of the curve, yo. OCD cat is also endlessly amazed by the editing process, because, well...I'm a pretty good author. I think I can say that without bragging, since, y'know, sold the trilogy and all. But give me a bunch of good proofreaders with machetes, and things become amazing. I'm watching this book just get better and better, and it's incredible.

* Finished the third chapter of The Mourning Edition, bringing me one step closer to world domination through zombies. I like world domination through zombies. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

* Entered about ten pages of data into my Toby Continuity Wiki, where it gleams in hyperlinked, clickable glory, thrilling my OCD heart to no end. It's gorgeous. I'm trying not to think about the part where it's the beginning of several hundred cumulative hours of work, because it really is going to make my life infinitely easier, and just dwell on the part where it's gorgeous.

* Started Discount Armageddon, book one of the Price series. Because I know you're gonna say it anyway, say it with me now: CHEESE! AND! CAKE! Also, ballroom dancing, snarky chameleon girls in fancy hotels, apartments sublet from Yeti, and La Parkour. It's good at be this kind of crazy.

My weekend was awesome. How was yours?

1) Return home from work. Update local backups of various files to reflect edits processed during lunch break, since failure to do this leads to madness and tears. Process slightly complicated by the sudden presence of an attention-starved Siamese cat who insists on licking every inch of my hands. Resistance is futile. You will be exfoliated.

2) Begin downloading edits received during commute. Be both daunted and elated by the sheer scope of said edits. Remember that maybe if I'd stop writing three or more books at a time, I wouldn't wind up opening my inbox to discover fifteen people commenting on my abuse of the common comma. Then again, what would be the fun in that?

3) Get accused of sadism by a proofreader. Cackle maniacally.

4) Compulsively answer all pending LJ comments on this blog, while the little voice in the back of my head scolds me for wasting time that could be spent processing all those edits from step two. Remind the little voice that if I do this every day, it takes fifteen minutes, rather than an entire Sunday. Little voice quiets, grumbling.

5) Process edits. The English language: I am once again doin' it wrong. Also continuity, punctuation, and making sense. Mysteriously, the books in question remain pretty good. I become increasingly more and more convinced that I have sold my soul at the crossroads. I also find it increasingly more difficult to be bothered by this notion.

6) Ask the cat what I should work on. The cat says I should work on feeding the cat.

7) Feed the cat.

Quietly he lurks, sharpening his knives, sharpening his wits, and booby trapping his escape routes, lest one of his cuttingly funny, cuttingly accurate comments causes me to bay for his blood. He is...SUNIL, SECRET NINJA PROOFREADER.

And he has just made me laugh so hard that peas came out of my nose. Actual peas, out of my actual nose.

This hurt.

Sadly, it's difficult to quote Sunil's edits directly, despite the fact that they are some of the funniest shit I've encountered in days, because, well, they're very dependent on the text around them. But he's hysterical. You gotta take me word on this one. I meant to just check to make sure he'd used one of my standard editing formats, and wound up processing eight chapters of commentary, because it was too damn funny to stop going through.

One of the best things about becoming a better writer has been the change in the kind of edits that I tend to get. Because, you see, when I no longer need regular lectures on pacing and character development, it becomes possible for my editors to focus on more important things, like causing me to breathe vegetation.

Best end to a Monday night ever. All hail Sunil!

Here go:

Chapters so far: eight
Total words: 70,814
Reason for stopping: finished the first eight chapters, which was the weekend goal.
Music: horror movies on Sci-Fi. Bad, bad horror movies.
Lilly: sleeping on the filing cabinet above my head. Like a fuzzy gargoyle.

So I'm eight chapters into the revision. My romantic lead has suffered a name change, going from 'Jason' to 'Kevin' due to some conflicts with, y'know, other books. Stupid other books, existing and...um...creating a genre for me to work in. Well, crudcakes.

My chapters have acquired titles, which is fairly spiffy, and I'm catching some excitingly uncaught continuity issues. (Seriously, I think that I and my proofers were both napping at certain points on this book. I will punish myself by watching more bad horror movies. Oh the agony.)

Productivity is awesome.

Quoth Brooke:

"I love a good semi-colon, but damn isn't worth one. Comma or full stop. I vote for full stop. Quorum of me. Motion carried unanimously."

You heard it here first, folks: Brooke is a quorum. All the tiny digestive bacteria in the belly of the Brooke have full voting rights, and we poor fools are outnumbered in our mono-organic shame.

And now it's time for more quality adventures in Brooke's Lagoon, where all my wishy-washy modifiers are eventually banished:

"The word very doesn't make first any firster. Misbegotten modifier lagoon has a special wading pool for you, very, with your very own, very hungry family of caymans."

...and...

"Oh, in FACT! I thought it was all a dream! IN FACT. LAGOON. SPLASHY SPLASHY."

...and...

"Yoohoo, very! (whistles) How'd you get out of the lagoon, you little rascal? ALLIGATOR HOSPITALITY SQUAD! PLEASE ESCORT VERY BACK TO THE LAGOON."

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, when you're booking your next vacation, choose Brooke's Lagoon! Maybe you'll never be seen again, but all those postcards that manage to make it back to civilization will be really, really well-edited.

When she's not making me snort Diet Dr Pepper over the editing process, Brooke is a pharmacologist, and helpfully broke her knee in a motorcycle accident. This makes her perfect both for checking the medical details in Newsflesh -- a wacky zombie adventure that will not include glaring pharmaceutical or 'riding your bike without dying horribly' errors. She's concise, generally accurate, and incredibly pointy when she wants to be. How I adore her. (It helps that she's a fellow member of the Orange Army, and while she fights my pandemic-lovin' ways, she shares my desire to turn the entire planet over to the giant squid.)

This is Brooke. Adore her, because there's a more than reasonable chance that she's heavily armed and might destroy you for the sake of her own petty amusement.

Ahem.

I have just -- I mean, within the past fifteen minutes 'just' -- finished the first pass revisions on Late Eclipses of the Sun, the fourth book* in the Chronicles of October Daye. That's several hundred pages of text that I have now pummeled to within an inch of its text-y little life. Since I haven't closed the proofing pool on An Artificial Night yet, this book gets to go to bed and mellow for about a week, like fine wine. Tomorrow, I'll start processing Brooke's truly epic edits on Newsflesh. For right now, however...

For right now, I shall CELEBRATE MY TRIUMPH by opening a can of peas, getting a Diet Dr Pepper, finding my art supplies, and going into the back of the house to watch crappy horror movies and ink. Because that's just how we roll around these parts.

Tomorrow, there will be zombies. Tomorrow, poor Clady may actually get my attention focused her way again. Tomorrow, I will consider -- seriously consider -- turning my attention back towards Grace, Chastity, and their little homovore problem. But that's all tomorrow. Tonight, I bask in the glow of my success. Tonight, I consume legumes.

Tonight, I watch TV.

(*This is the first book not covered by my current contract. Just FYI.)

So here's the skinny on the first four books:

Rosemary and Rue. First-pass editorial is done, and the book has been sent off to DAW to get cuddly with my editor, who will hopefully find it to be an amazing construction of chocolate chips and chainsaws, and thus be able to pass it straight on to the line-editors. While I'm wishing for impossible things, I'd also like a zombie pony full of money.

A Local Habitation. I have my editorial notes from The Editor and The Agent, and I'm about to start processing them. This should be a lot of fun. I find that every book improves immensely as it goes through the editorial process, even if, occasionally, it comes out the other side looking extremely different than it looked going in. This hasn't been officially 'turned in' yet, but it's getting very close.

An Artificial Night. We're still in 'game preserve' edits on this one -- I've been working industriously, and The Agent has seen it, but it hasn't gone to DAW yet. I'm planning to finish the home-team editing before the end of July, and I'm shooting to have the book turned in on an official basis by the end of the first week in August. This will be awesome, as it will free up a lot of my brain for working on...

Late Eclipses of the Sun. Book four! Book one of the second set of three, since almost everyone seems to think in trilogies these days! I'm in the middle of rewriting this one, and by 'the middle,' I mean 'currently, I'm on page 277 of 375, and things are rocking like a cruise ship in a tsunami.' I haven't turned the lions loose on it yet, but dude, the improvements are vast and epic as it is, and I can't wait to move on to the next stage.

After I finish with the LE revisions, I'm going to focus on The Brightest Fell, aka, 'book five,' and then move on to other projects. Because standing still is for other people. Also because I really enjoy having several books written past the point of 'current' in the series, since that means I have the luxury of changing my mind before the deadline.

It probably says something that my reward for finishing book four is going to be quality OCD-girl time with my brand-new continuity Wiki, but I'm trying not to think about that overly-hard.

Whee!

I have just finished my first post-editorial pass through Rosemary and Rue, book one in the Chronicles of October Daye. All changes suggested by a) my proofreaders, b) my own neurosis, and c) my editor have been incorporated into the text, which continues to get cleaner and crisper and more all-around happy-making with every smack of the machete.

I've also updated the continuity guide (yes, again) to reflect the new canon. I honestly can't wait for publication, not just because, dude, PUBLICATION, but because I so very much want to have official and formal and unchanging canon. I'm really looking forward to being forced to live with my decisions. It seems like it's going to be a pretty awesome thing to complain about.

Chris is setting up a Wiki for me to transition my continuity guide into, because that's going to be so much easier to work with than my current enormously massive .doc file that it isn't even funny. Infinite links! Category pages! Related pages! Truly, my geeky little heart swoons with the anticipation of making my already-obsessive database even larger, and more obsessive. And I found another month this morning, bringing the total of months represented in the series up to six. Behold!

Now I am going to turn in my manuscript, get dressed, and go to Starbucks. Because that's just the way we roll.

Right. Today, I have...

...processed three full sets of edits for An Artificial Night, one of which was twenty pages long and may as well have been subtitled 'everything you know is wrong.' I have now repaired everything I know. Everything I know is now right, and it's a better book (as it almost always is after one of these experiences). But oh my stars and garters, that took hours.

...brought my initial rewrites on Newsflesh up through chapter eighteen. Note that Newsflesh is over five hundred pages long. I have essentially rewritten an entire book this week, with another entire book to go, just as soon as I wake up. This terrifies and thrills me on multiple levels, and it's really very cathartic to wade into the text with a machete and giggle hysterically as I remove the unnecessary words.

This week, I have...

...started the revision process on Late Eclipses of the Sun, the fourth book in the Toby Daye series, which is currently subtitled 'please let the first three be incredible, mind-blowing successes, so that I can sell this book, because I love it so.' Because I am occasionally an insane workaholic, I'm already more than a hundred pages into the revision. It's very soothing. I'm enjoying it.

This weekend, I'm going to get back to work on Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues, because I feel like a slacker. (Yes, I'm aware of the sheer insanity of that statement. Carry on.) And with all this done and yet to do, I am going to bed, where I will sleep the sleep of the just.

Good night, world!

So back on June 9th, I started the major surgical adjustments to the third Toby Daye book, An Artificial Night. Again, I know the exact date because I never ever ever throw anything away ever, and also because my planner tends to have notations like 'started rewrites today' and 'actually ran out of pickle relish' on the monthly view. Because that's just the way I roll. After spending most of yesterday threatening a single chapter with pitchforks and torches, I cleared the hurdle and raced to the end of the book. WINNER!

I still need to do more proofing and processing before the book gets shipped off to The Agent for further consideration, but the heavy lifting has been done; it's time to put away the machete, get out the scalpel and the staple gun, and start repairing the smaller, more easily overlooked issues. Even after spending several months in 'everything I know is wrong oh dear heavens did I really write that?!' mode, this book remains my favorite of the first three, and that's like, seriously magical.

VELOCIRAPTOR DANCE PARTY TIME!!!! Because nothing says 'I just finished a book revision' like dancing dinosaurs.

Still being me, and still being totally incapable of sitting still for more than a few minutes, I've already started the revisions on Late Eclipses of the Sun, the fourth of the Toby books. (This is the first book that comes after my current contract with DAW. So if you want to read it, y'know, encourage everyone you've ever met to buy Rosemary and Rue.) I'm also getting ready to seriously buckle down on the Newsflesh revisions, because nothing says 'detox after wallowing in urban fantasy for six months' like 'zombies and politics.'

I love the fact that right now, there's always something else waiting to be worked on. And, of course, the editorial process is going to be kicking in sooner than later, which will take me right back to Rosemary, and a whole new set of adventures. But for right now...

Dance!

Dear brain:

'Chair' and 'cherry' are not the same word. If, by some horrible quirk in the functionality of the universe, you manage to begin dictating what things mean, please consider screwing with some other words. Words which do not have an impact on a major part of my summertime diet. Because seriously, here, I don't want to eat my desk chair, and I don't want to sit in my cherries.

In other news, you're very strange sometimes.

Love,
Me.

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.

Updated book stats:

Total words: 156,890*
Total chapters: thirty-one chapters, divided into five 'books' and a coda.
Total pages: 574.
Started: September 4th, 2005, on the plane back from Seattle.
Finished: December 27th, 2007, sitting at Tony's kitchen table, in Seattle.
Updates finished: June 3rd, 2008, in my bedroom.

After six months of being allowed to sit quietly in a drawer maturing, I'm finally starting the process of line-editing and revising Feed, my epic novel of zombies, politics, blogging, how George Romero accidentally saved the world and the tragic duty of the journalist. I forgot how much this book excites me just by existing. I love the setting, I love the characters, and I love the structure of it all.

Now it's time to really get down to brass tacks, and start beating this baby into shape. Even assuming the standard 10% loss between drafts, it's going to remain the longest thing I've ever written -- and quite frankly, I think it's the best.

Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.

(*After the additions requested by my first draft proofreading list, this is an increase of 6,802 words. Which is a very amusing number.)

The latest cuts are in from my crack squad of machete-wielding flying monkeys (aka, 'the editors), and today, Brooke has decided to take up arms against a sea of modifiers, and by mocking, end them. There are a lot of gems in the latest batch of editor commentary, but these are, without a doubt, my favorites:

* Dear initially and various: you have ten minutes to clear out your desks, and then security will escort you out of the sentence.

* SOMEWHAT. STRUNK AND WHITE ARE HERE. DO NOT STRUGGLE.

* Really, even, and remotely. Please join somewhat in the WISHY WASHY MODIFIER TRUCK for immediate transportation to a pit of quicklime.

* Just because the word "circumlocutions" has "circus" in it doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, don't use unnecessary -- or, God forbid, wishy-washy -- modifiers, or Brooke will come to your house, and she will end you.

This has been a public service announcement.

I have a nasty tendency to forget to put the end punctuation of a sentence inside the ' marks when I'm constructing a sentence. So rather than punctuating like this:

"It was very much 'screw you, I'm taking the dog.'"

I'll punctuate like this:

"So it was all 'hate you, hate Kansas'."

Now, this is Not Exactly Correct. And one of my fabulous proofreaders just pointed it out to me by saying:

"The punctuation is LONELY outside of its proper kennel, Seanan! Let it in! Let it snuggle down inside the quotation marks with the rest of the sentence!"

...I love my proofreaders. I love them like burning.

I'm in the middle of revisions on A Local Habitation, the second Toby Daye book and the sequel to Rosemary and Rue. The following bit of nuttiness was the result:

Me: "Tybalt has just shown up. Wackiness is sure to follow."
Brooke: "Yay Tybalt! He'll know what to do."
Me: "Injury may be on his list."
Brooke: "Tybalt's to-do list: Items 1 through 7: INJURY. Item 8: INSULT. Items 9, 10: INJURY."

Two observations arise from this. One: it's good to be the King of Cats. And two...I love my proofreaders.

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?