Tim Pratt's Blog, page 8

Make A Wish

I am still sick. My coughs are more productive, and last night my writing was slightly more productive, too, but I'm still depressingly low-energy.

NaNo: 1715 words last night. Back on track, at least. The book is around 27,000 words long now. It's going quite well. I'll need to layer in some incidental weirdness and sensory detail and descriptions in revision, but I'm getting down the bones of the plot and the relationships, and the dialogue is good.

Life: The kid had a little family birthday party last night, just his parents and aunt and cousins. Cupcakes! Candles! Presents! He had a wonderful time, and was a little cherubic beaming smiling delight. (Of course, he went to bed late, and then woke up early, and was a giant mass of crankiness this morning as a result. Oh well. Everything balances.) He gets a party with his friends on Saturday. Birthdays are so fun at that age.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Now We Are Four

NaNo: Only managed 1180 words yesterday, my lowest total since the month began. Not great, but I was sick, and actually expected to write nothing — my wife got a phone call, interrupting our Good Wife marathon, so I dragged myself to my chair and started typing. I'm still a few days ahead of schedule, so it's not terrible, but I hope to get more done today.

Otherwise: it's my son's fourth birthday! This morning I asked him, "Do you want a birthday waffle?" He said, "Yeah!" I said, "It's just like a regular waffle, but you eat it on your birthday!" (He did get to open a gift before school, though, and will get cupcakes and more presents tonight. We're having a little family party for him this evening, and a party with his friends on Saturday.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Not Quite Three/Very Nearly Four

Happy Monday!

NaNo: 2900 words yesterday. I would've written more, but I had to do a bit of research. Sometimes I think the internet search histories of fiction writers and serial killers must be distressingly similar.

A few miscellaneous catchups:

My wife Heather Shaw and I sold a novelette collaboration to PodCastle — a Xmas story! We don't have a final title yet, but it's our "Christmas Carol/Ghost-Finder" mash-up. Basically, after Marley's ghost departs, Ebenezer Scrooge goes out and wakes up a young occultist, and tells him, "Fix my spirit problem." (It's not really a "mash-up" in the usual sense — we only used a little bit of Dickens's actual text, mostly in the dialogue from the spirits.) We couldn't actually use William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki as a character (the timelines of the stories don't mesh), but we named our character Hodgson in homage. Anyway, I really like it, and you'll get to hear it in time for the holidays.

I've been asked to write a (shorter) Xmas story for another podcast too. And so I shall!

Richard A. Lupoff gave my new novel Briarpatch a fantastic review. "Briarpatch is pretty much sui generis. A couple of other novels do come to mind: Fritz Leiber's Our Lady of Darkness and Douglas Dorst's Alive in Necropolis." Not bad company.

It's my son's fourth birthday tomorrow. Four years ago today, I was extremely anxious. And tomorrow, instead of worry, exhaustion, and emergency surgery, we get singing and cake! (Though we don't get to welcome a new family member or see our lives utterly transformed for the better, so I'd still give the edge to the day of his birth in terms of awesomeness. Still though: singing and cake!)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Fallback

NaNo: 2450 words or so on Saturday, a few tapped out in the afternoon while the wife and kid ran errands (and after a lovely brunch), and a few in the evening. The novel sailed on past 21,000 words. It's zoom zoom zooming along, and soon things start to get truly crazy in novel-land.

Daylight Saving Time ended. So my kid didn't actually get me up at 6:50 am; he got me up at 5:50 am. And to think I once liked falling back, for that extra hour of sleep…

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

And on the Fourth Day

NaNo: Wrote 2,060 words yesterday. My total for the month so far is about 8700 words (and since I already had 10K written… well. We're looking at a fifth of a book done, more or less.) I would have written more, but good entertainment conspires against me. I'm reading the new King novel, and my wife and I are finishing off The Good Wife season 2 on DVD. So I read/watched instead of write-write-writing. But I exceeded my minimum for the day, so all's well.

Nobody reads the internet much on weekends anyway, so I'll leave it at that.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Dead Kennedys

NaNo: I wrote another 2500 words or so yesterday, a tiny bit while my son was eating his lunch, most in the evening. Not bad considering I also grocery shopped, played Legos with my son for hours, spent a long time at the library avoiding the rain, cooked soup, baked banana bread, worked out, cleaned up my kid's sleep-puke (sudden inexplicable sickness! oh boy! at least he didn't really wake up as we changed him and his sheets), and watched a little TV.

It was tough to resist the urge to read King's 11/22/63 all day. It's fun, and has one of the most hilarious and sensible answers to concerns about a certain time travel paradox that I've ever read. Good food, good books, good work — what more could one want? (Oh, yeah — a kid who doesn't get sick and throw up. That'd be nice. Poor boy. At least he felt fine and was cheerful all day.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

How do you like those apples?

NaNo Update: Wrote 2,500 words or so yesterday — a bit on my lunch break, the rest in the evening. A creepy pathologist has given his creepy opinion on a creepy medical mystery, and the subject of necromancy has been broached. Today I get to write someone running for her life and kicking robots. (Kicking robots is a futile thing; it hurts your foot, and doesn't much bother the robot.)

Last night I started reading King's 11/22/63, and it's totally engaging so far. I'm not particularly interested in the Kennedy assassination, but that doesn't matter; it's weird time travel! And more importantly, it's Stephen King. I'm pretty much a wholly non-critical reader when it comes to King, maybe because I started reading him so young. I just fall into his books completely and bob happily along. Even his books that didn't make a huge impression on me, that I wouldn't bother to re-read (Dolores Claiborne, Gerald's Game) are entirely engrossing on my first time through. I could easily do nothing else today but read that book… except my to-do list involves going grocery shopping, going to the library, cleaning house, playing with my kid, writing more, etc. etc. etc.

I have deemed things autumnal enough to make my famous apple onion parsnip carrot soup. Here is the "recipe" (keeping in mind that, with soups, I just kinda put stuff in until it tastes good):

Brown a pound or so of sliced sweet italian sausage in olive oil. Add chopped peeled carrots, peeled apples, onion, and parsnips, and saute until the onions are translucent. Add maybe half a dark beer and a generous splash of apple cider vinegar. Bring to a boil and let some of the liquid evaporate. Add chicken or veggie broth until it's as soupy as you like. Simmer a while. Season with rosemary. Serve with crusty bread or even sandwiches of sharp cheddar cheese. (How many of each veggie and what kind of apple to use is a matter of personal taste — I'd do maybe two carrots, a couple parsnips, a couple of Granny Smith apples, one good-sized onion.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

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.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Not Exactly NaNoWriMo

I'm not really doing NaNoWriMo, I mean, officially, for a few reasons. For one, I already wrote 10,000 words or so of the book for the proposal, so it's not really the "fresh start" that NaNoWriMo encourages. For another, it's a pseudonymous book and I'm supposed to keep my authorship under wraps for now. So I can't talk too much about it, or be as public as I might be otherwise.

BUT! I am going to endeavor to write 50K new words on the book this month, so I'm NaNoWriMoing in spirit, y'all, and will try to post here with daily with updates, at least until I go on vacation on November 27 — I will have little to no internet access that week, though I'll keep writing a bit, if I haven't hit 50K by then.

Good luck to everyone embarking on this crazy novel-writing extravaganza!

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Sandy Aygo

At WFC I did readings and met with editors and saw friends and went to parties and drank only slightly too much and interviewed an awesome writer for my day job and bought some books and finished writing a book, but that's all standard con report stuff, and I've said it all or variations before. Instead I'll tell you how the con was for my son River:

River was disappointed that there wasn't more sand in San Diego. (I mean, as he pointed out, it's right there in the name.)

He was also really quite angry that we were flying United instead of Southwest, because the Southwest planes are more colorful. (He asked one of our friends "what plane you fly on?" and when the reply was "Southwest," he rounded on me and said accusingly, "I told you they come to San Diego!")

He approved of the golf cart transportation at the hotel.

He hung out with our friend Sarah for a while, and was very enamored of the game they played, where they pretended to be lions and jumped out to scare passers-by. He later jumped out of the bathroom to scare his babysitter when she arrived.

He consistently called the dealer's room the "Boring Room" but he liked the art show. We let him pick out a print; he went with a picture of a kitten and a baby dragon.

Mostly his days were spent hanging out in the pool, where he rode a giant inflatable dragon. He also enjoyed running around a couple of afternoon parties. He got a couple of autographs from writers, which delighted him. He collected postcards and bookmarks with a certain amount of zeal. He met a little girl two days younger than himself and ran in circles with her in the registration area.

We got a babysitter on Saturday night so Heather and I could both go out. He was strenuously opposed to having a babysitter — until she showed up with a bag full of toys. Then he looked at me and said, "Dada, why you still here? When you going?"

Things you can do with a (nearly) four-year-old around 6 am in the vicinity of the Town & Country hotel in San Diego: Ride up and down elevators. Throw a penny in a fountain. (He wished for a dinosaur, and was disappointed when a dinosaur didn't materialize. I told him a dinosaur could take a while.) Walk across the bridge to the mall, pausing to marvel over the slimy water and to count ducks. Wander around an empty mall and peer in windows. Eventually, ride the trolley a few stops away and then back again, because preschoolers like trains.

While we were at lunch with our friend Greg, River said, "Do you want a cookie, or a diaper?" I said, "Uh, a cookie." He said, "We're all out of cookies, but we still have diapers." It was like he'd independently created Eddie Izzard's "Cake or Death" sketch.

River and my wife came to my reading. After 15 or 20 minutes, Heather wanted to leave, and told River they were going. He said, "Won't that embarrass Daddy?"

One morning he was playing pretend on the bed and said to me, "I'm the king's driver!" I said, "Way to aim high, kid." Later he was jumping on the bed (we let him jump on hotel beds, because we are terrible people), and he said, "I'm the king of the jumpers!" I said, "That's better."

He dragged me away from Daryl Gregory's (awesome) book launch party to hang out with him in a gazebo. He said to me, very matter-of-factly, "A gazebo is a kind of animal."

And that was WFC!

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.