Type-o-rama

November 17

Whoo. I had an exceedingly workish weekend. I wrote two reviews -- one of Dark Terrors 6 and one of Brian Hopkins's El Dia de los Muertos, both two of the best things I've read all year. Horror is alive and well, y'all; this is fantastically good stuff. That accounts for 1,000 words.

Otherwise, I revised.

Heavens, did I revise. First of all, I've typed about 15,000 words of Rangergirl stuff that I originally wrote longhand in notebooks. 15K, people. That's a lot of typing. I typed Friday night, yesterday morning, yesterday night, this morning, tonight... I think you get the idea. I wrote a lot of little interstitial scenes, too, and filled things out, and added details, and essentially rewrote the entire final chapter so that the book actually ends well, instead of just fading into low muttering. All that little writing accounts for the other 4,000 words -- it adds up. Every bit of Rangergirl is typed now, though, and I've started going through and typing in the changes I marked on my printout. And now... da dum... the first chapter is done! Letter-perfect, as far as I can tell. I'm giving the whole novel to a few people, once I get all the changes made, and they should point out anything that remains to be done -- if chapters are too long and need to be broken up, if character motivation is unclear, if any chunks of the story are just plain stupid, and so forth. But before I pass it around, I'm getting it as good as I can.

I'm not sick of this novel at all -- I love it. I've had so much fun typing stuff in, especially since many of the best scenes in the book were ones I wrote longhand -- the scene with Marzi and the Comanche, the whole climax, some of the stuff in the box canyon. I'm so happy with this book! I think it's going to be publishable, I really do.

Actually, it's not all typed -- I do have one more short scene to write, something that supports an action my protagonist takes later. I know what that scene needs to do, though, and how to accomplish it, so it shouldn't be too tough. I'll probably write it later this week.

Final word count looks to be about 130,000. A good length, I think, not too short, not insanely long.

I'm a happy boy.

***

Why else am I a happy boy? Heather and I picked up the engagement ring on Saturday! We'll probably post a picture of it soon. I still want to do a more formal proposal, but we decided it was silly to have the ring and not let her wear it, so it's been on her finger since last night, and for all intents and purposes, we're officially betrothed. The special thing I have in mind will be more a celebration of the proposal than anything else, a story to tell our kids someday...

I'm a lucky man. Heather is a treasure, and she's mine.

***

What else is there to say? When I haven't been working this weekend, I've been washing dishes or reading or watching television -- we watched The Professional last night, it's one of my favorite films. In a moment of weakness we wasted our money and rented Star Wars: Send in the Clones -- it's such an amazingly bad movie. I didn't consciously intend to rent a compare-and-contrast Natalie Portman experiment, but she's so much better in The Professional than in Star Wars, and it's all George Lucas's fault; he couldn't write himself out of a paper bag, so Portman has nothing to work with. Whatever charm the first trilogy had is utterly absent from the new ones. Or maybe I just think that because I saw the others as a child, and these two as an adult... it was nice to see Boba Fett's formative experiences, and some of the effects were cool, but mostly it was tedious. We actually stopped halfway through to watch something else for a while...

***

I got my contributor's copy of Say... Was that a Kiss?, and read more of it -- great essay by Terri Windling, odd but poetic piece by Chris Barzak, good story by Scott Westerfeld. Otherwise I spent the weekend reading Dark Terrors. When I wasn't typing, which is what I did, mostly.

***

And now, I think I'm going to type more changes to my novel. I just can't help myself...

Words written since February 1, 2002: 181,200

Words written since last entry:
5,000

Send us peace of mind. And I don't mean a life-insurance policy.

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

Root canals are expensive. I think it would be cheaper to replace our driveway with an actual canal. Help us pay for canals. Or 'zines, or what have you.