I spent most of the past week following my usual “between projects” routine. This consists of catching up on various correspondences, getting some mss back in circulation, following up on some mss that have been out for a while, and deciding what to do next.
I had hoped to start a new story–the Codex Halloween story I mentioned last week–but due to unavoidable delays, I haven’t yet received my story seed. For those unfamiliar with the process–each participant is supposed to send a story seed to another participant, from which we craft our stories. It’s up to us how we use these seeds. It’s an interesting challenge–one which I’ve met with, well, varying degrees of success. Still, I like the way it pulls an extra story out of me.
I’ll be interested to see how quickly I can write this. August is a pretty hectic month for me. Tomorrow I leave for Denver (to catch Rush at Red Rocks, and to visit friends). Then at the end of the month, I’m off to Atlanta for Dragon*Con. Come September, I plan to be thoroughly ensconced in the rewrite of Petra, which will take a few months, at least. So I’ll have maybe a week or two to get my Halloween story done.
Speaking of the novel, I am beginning to sift through feedback from my beta readers, including the evil magnificent
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. I’m a little unsure how to do this, exactly. My previous novels were written in a vaccuum; I’d gotten absolutely no feedback on them until I’d done two drafts on my own. In the interest of expediency, I’m actually letting people see first draft material this time. That, I think, was the right decision, but I’m not sure of the best way to process the crits. Part of me wanted to do a complete read-through on my own first. But I really wanted to know what people were saying about it. And besides, I thought I might be better able to get some distance on the work if I heard some criticism of it. So that’s the way I decided to go.
The comments are pretty favorable so far. No hugely glaring plot holes yet, and no one’s called it a pile of steaming monkey vomit. Some things have been pointed out that I would never have noticed on my own, which is the point, of course. The evil magnificent
did a pretty extensive line edit of the thing, wherein I expect to discover a whole lot more of this stuff. She’s also spotted a bit of first-draft-itis, such as place names that change for no reason, other than I forgot I had already named them. Happens when you write quickly, I guess. But overall, I’m encouraged.
I’m still awaiting the results of one more beta read, so I shouldn’t count those chickens just yet.
No updates for Write Club.
So I’m off to Denver tomorrow. Any chance I’ll see some of y’all while I’m there?
