Elizabeth Moon's Blog, page 127

Cover Art!!

The cover art for Oath of Fealty is now on display at the Paksworld blog and will be on the websites soon.

I'm doing the authorial happy dance!

Nose to the Grindstone: Revisions

Since my copy edits aren't here to work on, I've been working instead on the structural revision of the new new book, which for shortness I may call Nameless I because it has no title.  (Nameless II has also begun, mostly as short bits that haven't gathered momentum yet.)

As usual, the main structure seems to be holding together, but there are difficult bits that haven't found their place, and odd gaps that pretty much mark out where a plot-bomb landed on what I was doing and sent me racing off t

Cooking Day

With the promise that it may not reach 100F today,  and the realization that there's only one slice of homemade bread left, today has been declared Bread Day and Cereal Day.  (There's also only a half cup of my cereal mix left in the jar.)   Many other chores await, but Bread Will Happen.

Cereal Day is the easier to accomplish...the big soup pots come out and I start mixing the four base cereals, seeds, and nuts, then put the mix into the cereal jars (old one-gallon storage jars) and whatever's l

Flu and You (and Me, and Everyone)

Although the H1N1 strain of flu is now considered pandemic (having met the criteria of number of cases in number of places of proven human-to-human transmission),  most people aren't hearing much about it, and what they are hearing is aimed at reassurance rather than readiness.

No, boys and girls, the H1N1 flu has not gone away.  Both a recent cover article in NATURE, with additional articles discussing the changes in its genetic makeup and how that affects treatment, and this page by Peter Sandm

Sunday

Today I sang both services, Britten's "Jubilate Deo."   I may hate it slightly less than I used to, but compared to the Mozart one we sang earlier this year, it's much less fun to sing and (in my very-biased-against-Britten-opinion) doesn't deserve to sit on the same shelf.  Nonetheless, it was an accident that I messed up one entrance (it was Britten's fault, because he made that entrance fiendishly difficult to get right.)    The "Jubilate Deo" is not as downright ugly as, for instance, the "F

Writer's Block: First Aid

Have you ever performed CPR, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, or the Heimleich maneuver on someone in an emergency?

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Yes.

Nose to the Grindstone: maybe finished draft

Book #2's first draft is done.  I think.   After 4800 words on it today, it feels like it found its end.  

And I got it done before the copy-edits on Book #1 arrived.  Whoo-hoo! 

Now for ibuprofen for my hands and elbows, and a nap.

More Nose to the Grindstone

2600 words today so far, and the book is bullying me to write more in spite of my elbow, my hands, my backside...

Plot bombs continue to rain down from above, each of them demanding to be written *right now*.   This instant.  Never mind the smoking one that just cracked open and is sending little fiery phrases into my head...

For a few more (but not too many more) details, check the Paksworld blog.

Nose to the Grindstone

Book two of the new chronicles of Paksenarrion's world is now at 155,000 words.

It's after 1 am.  I am wrung out.  VERY tricky day of writing and I was at it from 8 am.   (With breaks, but not long ones except for a two-hour nap.)

Never assume the guy sitting in the bathtub far from his weapons is harmless.

On Books: Gloating Villains

Sometimes real life is visibly dramatic, and when I thought about the various complaints directed at fictional villains, I remembered that real-life villains do, in fact, do the things that fictional villains do (that are often considered a writer's ploy.)

Take, for instance, the villain gloating over the helpless victim.   Why doesn't he/she just kill the helpless victim (the hero, the hero's girlfriend, the lost prince, etc) before the victim or the victim's friends can kill the villain?

Because