Marie Brennan's Blog, page 256

What happens when I do Fun Work

It's hard to say how many words I wrote today, since some of it involved replacing a bit of scene I'd written before, but it's definitely north of 5K.

This is what happens when I let myself work on something other than What I Should Be Working On. (Even if the something else is, technically, also something I should be working on. It ain't the novel currently under deadline, which is all that really matters.)

Tomorrow, we see if we can't polish off that nearly-finished short story, and get som...

They don't have to be one-armed.

A question for my buff female friends: how many push-ups can you do?

(I ask for story purposes. I'm doing Fun Work, and need to know how many my jock protagonist would do if she felt like showing off. Which she does, 'cause she's like that.)

more giveaways

It occurs to me A Star Shall Fall isn't the only book I could do a giveaway for. If you don't already have a copy of In Ashes Lie (or want one that's signed), you can now try to get one over on GoodReads. (That one goes until August 7th; you have until this Friday to put your name in for the offered copy of Star.)

mini-post-novel ennui

I had grand plans of doing some "fun work" (that is to say, writing that isn't the novel) tonight.

Hah. I'm going to curl up in bed with Red Hood's Revenge and read until I ptfo.

Work can resume tomorrow.

Marathon it is.

If I didn't have a very full day planned for tomorrow, I would totally stay up and see if I can knock off the final scene of this part. As it stands, I'll have to call it a night after only 4,441 words.

Favorite line: "So that's where the fucking naga went." Surprise naga for the win!

(Do me a favor and forget about the naga by the time the book comes out next year. Otherwise it won't be a surprise.)


Edited to add: Eh, screw it. Sleep is for the weak. And this way I'll get to kick back prop...

a better human being than I could ever hope to be

Another link I've had sitting around for a couple of weeks: Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus.

Read the whole thing. Yes, it's long, and we live in an age of attention-deficit disorder, where any blog post longer than a few paragraphs threatens to trigger a tl;dr response. But you need to go through it to grasp the enormity of this man's life: not just what Abd el-Kader accomplished in his fifteen years fighting the French (notice how many times he wrestled them into stalemates or su...

another chance to win a book

I think I'll try to do about one of these a week until A Star Shall Fall releases: if you head on over to Goodreads, you can enter the drawing for a giveaway of another ARC.

(I'll also do at least one more giveaway here on LJ, so you won't have to be a member of Goodreads to try and snag a copy.)

80K!

The 80K landmark used to mean more to me. It still means "real book" in a way lower numbers don't; it's hard to sell an adult book that's less than eighty thousand words long. But it used to mean I was well over halfway done with the novel, maybe seventy or eighty percent of the way there.

And then I started writing Onyx Court books. <sigh>

On the bright side, I'm close enough to the end of Part Two that I can taste it. Barring disaster, I'll be done by the end of the month (which is the goa...

museum (shop) gripe

Why is it that, without fail, museum shops never have the thing I want to buy?

I'll go through an exhibit and there will be some painting or sculpture or artifact or whatever that just charms me or blows me away, and when I get to the museum shop, I begin an eager race around the room, wanting to take some memento of that piece home with me . . . but there's nothing. No print of the painting. No postcard showing the artifact. Nada.

The worst offender in my memory was probably the touring exh...

People get paid for this crap?

I don't know what it is, but within the last year or two, the synopses on the Apple movie trailers site have just become abysmal. Not so much in content -- though a few of them are irritatingly content-free, leaving me with no sense of what the film is about -- but style. A sentence from the synopsis for Lovely, Still: "What begins as an odd and awkward encounter quickly blossoms into what appears to be a romantic late life love affair that takes us on a heartfelt and wonderful journey whic...