In the Atrium of My Atria

October 17

So tonight I went to the café while Heather had a girl-talk night (she's still having it, actually, and I'm alone in the house as I type now, listening to the Old 97s sing "Barrier Reef", except for the pregnant future sister-in-law snoozing downstairs on the couch with the television on very quite loud). I read an article in one of the local weeklies about comic artist/writer Adrian Tomine, of Optic Nerve; I hadn't realized he was local. There are so many amazingly brilliant people living around here, on both sides of the Bay; it's astonishing. Of course, I don't hang out with many of those brilliant people, though I hang out with enough of them that I shouldn't complain. It's interesting, to feel myself slowly rising in the field I have chosen, and to look around and see my friends and contemporaries rising with me... It was a pretty decent article, I suppose, long and interesting. If you haven't read Tomine, you should; Optic Nerve is wonderful. I like him better even than Daniel Clowes, though they operate on roughly the same plane.

I also achieved regular status at the café for the first time; the nice dreadlocked barista asked if I wanted my usual drink. La.

As you good people may know, next week I'm going to do most of the heavy lifting on revising Rangergirl. I printed out the first four chapters tonight, and started marking them up while I was out... and it's pretty good. Very good. Damn good. I wrote these chapters well over a year ago, and haven't read them since, and I still think they're good, which is promising -- I tend to be much more critical of my work once the dew's dried off. I line-edited a fair bit, and added some depth of description, tweaked some of the dialogue, and changed some details to make these chapters consistent with stuff that happens later, but the bulk of it is very solid, I think.

Which is good, since these are the chapters that get sent out to agents, that introduce the characters, set up the nested conflicts, hint at deeper mysteries and future revelations. I really love this book. I love the characters, it's full of cool shit, I think it's a compelling story... I hope it goes far. I'm not too stressed about writing the synopsis, either -- I actually think it'll be fun.

Anyway, I've gone from being rather trepidatious about the revision process to being cautiously optimistic. I'm a much better writer on a structural and a line-by-line level than I was when I wrote my last novel, in 1999, and it really shows. Revising the 1999 book was really difficult in places, and I had to rewrite page after page of garbage prose. I think that'll be less of a problem here. It's not a flawless first draft by any means, but it's better than I'd expected. So far. I suppose it could collapse in chapter 5, but I doubt it; I suspect it gets better as it goes on.

Sorry to go on and on about this book, but it's filling up my head again. I wonder if I'll ever write about these characters any more, you know? If they'll be in stories in the future -- I seriously doubt there's another book about them, but maybe some stories. They'd be well suited for comics, too, as far as that goes. Sigh. I'll miss them. I really love them, the villains, too. I'm excited about the next book, but Rangergirl is so close to my heart it's shelved in my left ventricle.

So no words get added to the big count tonight, but I did get work done, nonetheless, and I'm feeling good. It even feels like autumn around here, cool and gray, and my experiment with berry-flavored iced tea went well, better than the raspberry experiment, so everything's nice, really.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 175,900

Words written since last entry:
0

Send me a drunken night of Truth or Dare like she had in college.

Tim Pratt
P.O. Box 13222
Berkeley, CA 94712-4222

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