Lionize

NaNo Update: I wrote about 1650 words on my Secret Forbidden Mystery Project of Mystery (hereafter “SFMPM”) last night, bringing my total word count to 11,500ish out of an estimated 90-100K total. Hey, it’s a tenth of a book! (Of course, it was pretty much a tenth of a book already.) It took me a few hours to generate those words, because I was reading through the existing chapters, making tweaks, cutting bits and adding bits, expanding scenes, and etc. Nothing truly new was written, but many things were clarified, and I started doing foreshadowing for some of the last-third reveals I have in mind. Given that I first wrote the proposal for this book in 2009 (it took a while to sell), I couldn’t just dive right in to writing new scenes — I needed to immerse myself in the voice of the book again, and revising the first 10K was a good way to go about it. I’m going to try to set aside an hour a day, every day, to work on this book. If I can do that, the deadline may not kill me.

On an unrelated note, my poem “Lion Heart” is up at Apex magazine, in the first issue under the editorship of Lynne M. Thomas, who asked me to write a poem. (The poem is kind of super depressing, though there’s a gleam of hope too, I think. Ever since I had a kid, the thought of losing a child has shot to the top of my nightmare list, and for poetry, well — sometimes you have to consider your nightmares.) It’s a great issue overall. If you like what you read, support the magazine by subscribing and so on.