Barbara Hambly's Blog, page 38

New print-run!

For those of you who've asked me about this, I just heard that Dead & Buried has been re-printed (trade paper) and will be in the warehouse within a week or two. And, I'm extremely gratified for this extremely solid demonstration to my publisher about what a desireable property I am.

Striving toward getting most of Draft 2 done before the 29th of August, which is the day school starts. I'll be teaching three classes (one of which is a new one for me, but one to which I've looked forward for a long time, World History - Ancient China, YES!)  Heian Japan... one of the top contenders for Weirdest Civilization I've ever encountered... compare, for instance, two works written at roughly the same time at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass... Beowulf and The Tale of Genji. Both - like many ancient tales and epics - address the issue of, what is it, to be a man? (Consider Achilles in the Iliad. He's not even NICE. Nobody in that whole epic ever does a single nice thing for somebody else, except for Achilles giving back Hector's mutilated body to Hector's dad, because the gods ORDERED him to. But, he's the Hero because he's the best). Face-off: The Shining Prince vs The Big B.

Wild Kingdom

Amazing. A small hawk seems to have moved into the neighborhood. I saw him (her?) a couple of days ago sitting on a phone-wire having an argument with the local crows (there is a crow air-base somewhere near-by). Yesterday evening as I took my walk I heard it scream, that thin, wailing Nazgul-scream they do. And today as I was eating lunch, the thing came and sat on the trash-can directly outside the dining-room window, so I got a good look at it. It's about as big as a crow, sort of golden biscuit-brown, flecked all over with dark brown or black. Golden eyes and hooked bill, and that crazy look they have in their eyes.

Which reminds me of the funeral - a couple of years ago now - of the mother of a friend of mine... My friend had arranged a dove-release at the end of the very beautiful service. As we all went out of the chapel, four white doves were released into the sky -- and a big ol' hawk came diving down and WHAPPED one of them. I think the dove eventually got away, but Ms Hawk clearly knew where to hang out for the white dove smorgasbord. If I hadn't felt so bad for my friend's loss, (and for the poor little dove, of course) I would have laughed.

Lost in the Twilight Zone...

A friend of mine told me he recently saw a crocheted cover that someone had made for a public bike-rack in a public street. Moreover, he informed me that an acquaintance of HIS had seen such a thing on a public street in Hawaii.

You can't make this stuff up.

But, I am truly enjoying the stuff that I AM making up. More paper in the pile. (Second draft is double-spaced, so it looks respectable sooner). But, keep running into things like, "Oh, they'd have different measurements there... or had they converted to the metric system? What WERE measurements called and how long, deep, or heavy were they?" (Like trying to figure out the Russian calendar for Blood Maidens, or the differences between time in European countries before time zones were invented.)

There are days - like today - when I want to completely d...

There are days - like today - when I want to completely disregard the routines that make up day-to-day living and just write on into the night - let the dog go unfed and unwalked, the cat-boxes uncleaned, not do the grocery shopping, and not do the prep-work ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for the class that's going to start IN THREE WEEKS (and certainly not keep up with my blog). I've seldom had a problem "disciplining" myself to sit down and work. The problem has always been "disciplining" myself to do anything else - with the exception of the time I spend with friends and family. I grudged taking a nap this afternoon because it cut into my work-time, despite the fact that I was so sleepy (long story) that what I was turning out was drek.

I don't know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, or whether the mode I've worked out for my own existence as a writer is "correct." I live by myself; I feel better and write better if I get exercise and don't live on junk; I need (and love) my part-time teaching work and look forward to teaching a new class (which NEEDS those maps I have to start this evening...)

I also need rest. I remember my first weekend-long writing-binges - Star Trek stories for my friends in 1966 - and the savor has not abated one iota. (Although at the time I was in High School and didn't have to worry about things like the mortgage, medical insurance, or what food was in the fridge...)

I've never found an answer to this problem.

Dating

Pulled together the calendar for 1912 - it always looks better if I can name specific days ("After what happened Thursday night..." "He realized he hadn't slept since Tuesday..."). So, at some fairly early point in the writing process, I figure out what some day/date correlation was (for instance, in 1912 September 23 was a Monday), then look in old journals until I find a year where they match up. It's easy to go online and find charts for, what was the phase of the moon (and boy, does THAT make a difference about what Asher can and can't see outside at night!), and what are sunrise/sunset times for wherever the story is taking place. (When we get out of bed at 7, is it still dark and freezing cold, or what?)

Simple stuff, but it looks good.

Started the new pile of paper (second draft). Despite man...

Started the new pile of paper (second draft). Despite many things which need to be done (I'm up to the Fall of the Roman Empire...), I honestly don't want to do anything else. Second draft is always my favorite part of writing, when the awful sweat of pulling together how-do-they-get-from-A-to-B is done, and now I can play with dialog and description, and make sure I mention the gun under the rock in the garden.

Trekked up to the college to have a look at the rooms for...

Trekked up to the college to have a look at the rooms for this fall's classes (when I'd really rather have been working on starting the re-write...). Another box-car room - again in the trailers out by the dumpsters - originally designed for two classrooms and oriented with maps, white-board, etc on the long wall, meaning that information written on the white-board at one side of the room cannot be read by students sitting on the other side of the room... in effect, meaning I can't use the white-board. None of the three rooms has desks - only tables. Thus, half the students will be sitting with their notebooks on their laps in order to face me. Do they have problems like this at Harvard?

The box-car, however, opens, not onto the asphalt interstices between trailers like the one I had last semester did, but onto the green playing-field. This may be lovely and restful, but it may mean that in addition to all else, we get to listen to soccer-games during the lectures (the trailers being about as sound-proof as trailers are).

I have also begun to get the first trickle of e-mails from would-be students who were unable to get into any of the history classes they need in order to graduate, and would I let them into mine? I understand it takes three or four years to get through community college these days, owing to budget-cuts => class cuts. Vexing.

I will take a nap, and go back to dealing with zombies. (And vampires, of course...)  Something tells me I need to get as much of this done as possible, before school hits.

Picture?

Hmn - are the instructions for inserting a picture for a Basic Account? They gray out when I try to load one from elsewhere on the computer.

Another day of Boss Battle, Part 2 (including the portion of the day in which I should have been working on a lecture about the Fall of the Roman Empire). Tomorrow, with luck, Boss Battle Part 3, but part of today was sitting staring at nothing and figuring out exactly HOW things get from Point B to Point C, who shoots who with shotguns full of silver deer-shot, how Asher's old mentor from Prague, Dr. Karlebach, can have two melodramatic confrontations in different places, and how they get rid of all those dead zombies? (I mean, after they're REALLY dead).

All that mapped out, tomorrow's work should go fairly easily and I HOPE that'll wrap the first draft, whoo-hoo! Then will come MASSIVE re-writes, since the historical situation I'm working in turned out, on deeper research, to be rather different than what I'd first thought. It actually works out much better, but a lot of words need to be replaced.

A very early start on a very long day, with little work d...

A very early start on a very long day, with little work done. One of those days when I realized that what I was doing was going to have to be re-done tomorrow: too tired, and slightly melancholy.

Jasmine, however, approves of the new chair, and has taken to dozing in it while I'm elsewhere in the house - probably simply because it is new. My beloved George once ran a test on his fat old b&w cat Baby, to see how small a piece of paper she'd come over and sit on, if you left it in the middle of the floor. He started with a sheet of typing paper: she sat on that. He cut it in half, laid half on the floor: she came over and sat on that. He halved it again, and that was still sittable-on. Eventually he ascertained that Baby would come over and sit on a business-card if it was left in the middle of the floor - and attempt to get the whole of her plump self on the card.

She also - as cats do and will - would hop up onto any new thing placed in the living-room, including boxes. I forget what we'd gotten by UPS - something large, in an immense box of styrofoam peanuts. We had the box open, and Baby came in and hopped up onto what she thought was the top of a box... and immediately sank into the peanuts, except for her head. The photo I took of her looks as if we'd ordered a cat-head shipped to us in a huge box of peanuts - a cat-head with a TRULY pissed-off expression on its face.

Boss Battles and Barley Tea

Boss Battle, YES! Wall-to-wall dead zombies. I've typed til my hands hurt. I love days like this.

A very early day tomorrow, to perform the offices of friendship. I would LOVE it, if I could get the bulk of the work on Asher/Ysidro wrapped before school starts at the end of next month (and maybe finish the Antryg and Sun Wolf stories for the website). Three classes is going to mean not a lot else getting done for about 16 weeks (during which I'll need to get a running start on January # 12).

So, the second half of Boss Battle, and out of the rough draft before the end of the week!

Having had to give up even decaff tea (which contains enough caffeine to upset my now hyper-sensetized system) I've re-discovered the Victorian comforts of barley-tea. Always nice after slaughtering Undead.