Rachel Neumeier's Blog, page 95

Writing Fiction With No “Mind’s Eye”

An interesting post that leads to a fantastic exercise in imagination: Aphantasia: Writing Fiction With No ‘Mind’s Eye’

I’d been writing fiction for more than a decade before I encountered the term “aphantasia,” which describes a rare inability to see mental images in the mind’s eye.

I’d been instructed many times to visualize an image to meditate, relax, remember or write, but when I tried, I saw nothing. Over time, I assumed that “visualize” and “mind’s eye” were figures of speech. I didn’t know other people could literally generate images in their minds without a real-life image to look at.

Media reports suggest aphantasia affects about 2% of the population, or one of every fifty people. The condition may be genetic or the result of trauma. By their own reports, my parents see mental images; my sibling doesn’t.

People with aphantasia learn to substitute other mental processes to work around the lack of mental images to some extent. Instructed to “picture a lemon,” I can think of the color yellow and the classic shape of a lemon. Asked to “picture the letters of the alphabet,” I can sketch them in my mind’s eye, in monochrome, up to about the letter “h,” then I get a vicious headache and have to stop.

This is just so difficult to imagine! I know that undoubtedly plenty of people have a better visual imagination than I do, there’s no doubt a wide, wide range of phenomena in this regard. But knowing that and being able to imagine what it might be like are completely different.

Whenever possible, I visit my settings in real life and write notes about what I observe.

In writing my Fantasy novel, I stuck with Contemporary Fantasy — our world, our time — rather than write about an imagined world. Setting the story where I live, in Ventura, California, gave me plenty of places to see in real life. I scheduled time to visit my settings during the same season and at the same time of day as my characters.

That’s a reason to write contemporary fantasy that never occurred to me!

The link that’s supposed to go to a quiz where you can assess your visual ability is … well, too complicated for me, I guess, or else it makes you sign up for a newsletter, which I don’t want to do. Buzzfeed steps in to fill the need for a much simpler to access, if possibly less valid, quiz. It’s all self-assessment about how clearly you can picture stuff.

Regardless of the validity of quizzes like this, aphantasia and other variability in imagination is just plain interesting. I wonder if anybody has ever written a telepathic character who was puzzled or baffled or confused by the variability in the internal worlds of the people around him. This didn’t occur to me. I’m not sure it’s ever occurred to any author who’s written a telepath.

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Update: unexpected digressions

Okay, so:

A) Yes, there’s been a dramatic slowdown for Tasmakat. However, I did get a lot of work done on it over the weekend. We are pretty close to (FINALLY) leaving Avaras. WorldCon is coming up, obviously, so I don’t know whether I’ll even look at it from this Wednesday to the following Tuesday. Maybe? Depends on how early I wake up each morning in Chicago. I’ll be taking my laptop for sure, so we’ll see.

B) So, I woke up really early Sunday morning and you know what was in my head? Silver Circle. That sort of thing often happens when I’m working on one book, but I’m not into it. Thoughts about another book suddenly appear. This has never happened before with any book in the Tuyo world. I guess it happened this time because in Tasmakat, I’m in a transitional scene that doesn’t interest me a lot; and also because (obviously) Tasmakat practically came to a standstill last week. The back of my brain apparently thought it was time to move on to a different project. The good news is that I now have several pages of notes about Silver Circle. There are a million loose threads that I need to collect, so notes are going to be important for that story.

C) The first draft of Tasmakat is going to be even longer than I thought. If it gets too insane, I may quit moving ahead long enough to go back and start cutting it down, just so I can stop looking in appalled fascination at the wordcount. Cutting may also be something I can do if my focus has been pulled away by this Gen Bio class, or whatever else may be going on for that matter.

D) Wow, I did a crappy job explaining the scientific method. This is plain because of Quiz One, which presented a scenario and asked students to come up with an experiment. It’s good to find out where I dropped that important ball now. I’ll pick that ball up tomorrow before I open the new topic (Chapter 2: Chemistry). Then I’ll present a very different scenario as an essay question on Test One and see how they do. After going over this quiz and discussing points of confusion, I hope they will all do extremely well on that question. I’m going to tell them a question like that will be an option, so they ought to. (I’ll hand them five or six essay questions and tell them to pick three.)

E) Leda is in season. I could possibly breed her. However, WorldCon is in the way, so I guess I won’t attempt it. Definitely no puppies till next year.

F) Naamah is just fine. This is day six post-surgery and she’s already about back to normal. Her recovery was indeed very fast, much faster than my previous dogs with pyo. She does believe she should be getting treats for all meals now, as her appetite was very poor for several days and she was therefore on a special Whatever She Will Eat diet. (Liver brownies, chicken, extra palatable canned food.) Now that she’s feeling so much better, she will probably decide dog food is edible pretty soon, and if not, I’ll give her Entyce, an extremely useful appetite stimulant that I have on hand.

G) I’m going to go ahead and place the kittens in a new home, with a person who will also be at WorldCon, so the transfer can happen there.

I’m very sorry to let them go. They are lovely and adorable and funny, and they’re fine with the dogs. The dogs are fine with them too. And it’s not like I’ll be having puppies any time soon. BUT, I can’t have the pet doors open. I’m almost positive the yard is not kitten-proof. The girl kitten in particular is exceedingly acrobatic and bold about climbing and leaping. Naamah is in an x-pen while she recovers from surgery, and this kitten instantly climbed up the x-pen and now thinks of that as her special route to get onto the kitchen island. I think she would get out of the yard. I’m almost sure she would. It would kill me if she got out and got eaten by a fox. We’ve had so many dumped cats and kittens disappear this year, mostly within a day or three of getting dumped, that I really don’t think her chances would be good at all. But I hate to just never again open the pet doors. That’s really not fair to the dogs. So … this other home is excellent. Their yard is cat-proof as well as dog-proof.

It has been a tremendous pleasure to have them for the past five weeks or whatever it’s been. I’m going to ask the new owners to send me occasional pictures.

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Typing quirks

From Kill Zone Blog, this entertaining post: (Not) Using the Middle Finger

I thought it might be about cussing in fiction or something. No. It’s literally about fingers:

So here I am typing with seven fingers, and one thumb for spacing.

I’m sure we all type differently. Some with only index fingers, while others might utilize more digits as they watch the keys. There’s the “hunt and peck” crowd, and then those of us who were taught to touch type without looking at the keyboard.

That’s where I fall in. I never look at my fingers or the letters, only the words that appear on the screen, at least until three weeks ago when my orthopedic physician diagnosed a partially torn ligament in my left middle finger. That injured digit is now strapped securely to its index neighbor, requiring me to watch my left hand hunt and peck.

I’m chuckling in recognition and sympathy. I’ve sustained various finger injuries over the years, and therefore type without using the ring finger on my left hand. The scar on the tip of that finger is still fairly sensitive and apparently always will be, but I could use that finger these days. On the other hand, I don’t see any reason to bother re-training myself to use that finger, so I don’t use it.

I have a tendon issue with my right thumb. I don’t use that thumb at all while typing. In fact, I try to minimize use of that thumb in daily life and seldom, for example, grip the steering wheel with it. I never try to open jars with my right hand. As far as typing goes, I hit the space bar with my left thumb or (I just now realized) sometimes with my left index finger. (I just did that while typing this post. I hadn’t realized I ever did that, but apparently sometimes I do.)

The surprising thing to me is that retraining yourself not to use one or another digit is not very difficult at all. At least, that’s been my experience. Plus, the unexpected benefit of training myself not to hit the space bar twice after periods. If you’re going to be switching hands for the space bar, that’s the time to change that habit. I used to just do a global find and replace to switch double spaces for singles. I still do, as a handful of double spaces tend to creep in as plain errors. I wouldn’t have bothered changing that habit if I hadn’t also needed to retrain my hands anyway.

A different issue: the letters wear off the keys. That means I really have no choice but to look at the words on the screen because about half the letters aren’t on the keyboard. Of course occasionally I put my fingers in the wrong spot and type something like yu[r dp,ryjomh ;olr yjod/. You know how there’s a little raised gizmo on the keys where you’re supposed to have your index fingers? That’s worn off too.

Well, I’ve hated my laptop practically since I got it. Eventually the damn thing will break in a way that legitimately compels me to get a different laptop and then, for a while, I will have letters on all the keys. I don’t like the modern laptops I see the students using, however, so I’m dragging my feet. I may hate and despise my laptop, but at least I’m familiar with its exceedingly annoying quirks.

Anyway, how many of you are nodding? Oh, yeah, you quit using one finger or another a decade ago, or yes, you too lose the letters off half the keys? I bet this sort of thing happens a lot.

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Last Day of The Black Dog series Sale

The promotion for the Black Dog series ends at midnight tonight. If you haven’t got these books and you think you might like to try them at some point, this is a good time to pick them up.

The first couple are free, all the rest have been dropped way down.

No doubt I’ll run another sale next year, but this is it for the Black Dog series for 2022. Pick ’em up now!

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Well, this is Extremely Disappointing

Okay, well, no puppies for me. Or at least, not from Naamah. She had pyo and is now recovering from an emergency spay.

This is the third young bitch I’ve had who had pyo. I caught it relatively early and I don’t think Naamah will be as sick as some.

As a public service message, let me just mention that roughly 25% of all intact bitches do get pyo. A significant number die because the owner doesn’t recognize what’s happening fast enough. Untreated, pyometra is always fatal. If the treatment — an emergency spay is by far the preferred treatment — is delayed, the bitch will be very, very sick. Some will die despite everything the veterinarian can do.

More common in older bitches, in fifteen years, I’ve had a three-year-old with pyometra twice and a five-year-old once. I know someone whose puppy had pyo after her first season, when she was seven months old, and very nearly died. Every single pet owner who has an intact bitch needs to look up the signs of pyometra and keep a close eye on their bitch from two to eight weeks after she’s been in season. If she goes off her food, watch her very carefully. If she starts to act sicker and/or starts drinking more water and/or has a discharge as though she’s going back into season, take her in right away. Don’t make an appointment for two weeks later. Take her immediately, the moment you think she could have pyo. Pyometra is always an emergency. Always.

So … yeah, after fifteen years, I’m pretty inured to bad luck. This was a disaster in terms of losing Naamah’s reproductive potential without ever getting even a single puppy, and of course it was a financial disaster, but disasters of all kinds are not uncommon and I’m always prepared for pet medical emergency expenses. But this is why I sound so sincere when I advise pet owners not to breed their pet. I am extremely sincere.

We actually need a lot more knowledgeable, responsible people breeding. Contrary to popular opinion, we don’t have nearly enough well-bred puppies to go around; we don’t even have enough badly bred puppies to fulfill the demand; we don’t even have enough dogs in shelters to begin to fill the demand for young dogs. Shelter intake has absolutely crashed over the past 50 years, so for decades shelters in some areas of the country (the Northeast) have been importing impounded strays and puppy mill dogs from other areas of the country (the Midwest) and, prior to 2021, from developing countries, in order to keep shelters full. That shortage is what keeps puppy mills in business and incentivizes backyard breeders to thoughtlessly and carelessly breed dogs when they have no clue how to evaluate structural soundness, never mind type. But it takes a lot of time and effort to learn how to breed responsibly, and even if you’re knowledgeable and experienced, terrible things happen all the time. One of those terrible things is pyometra.

It could have been a lot worse. At least Naamah is recovering well this morning. I’ll go get her this afternoon and, although she’ll be much sicker than any bitch after an ordinary spay, she’ll be fine. The only question now is whether I’ll keep her or place her as a pet. She’s got a demanding temperament for a Cavalier and would need just the right pet home, and after all I have plenty of room in MY home at the moment, so we’ll see.

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Antagonists vs Villains

A post at Writers Helping Writers: An Antagonist vs a Villain: What’s the Difference?

I think this is pretty straightforward! Without reading the post, I would sum up the difference like this:

An antagonist is someone or something your protagonist needs to overcome.

A villain is a bad person working against your protagonist.

Let’s take a look at this post and see if that’s the fundamental difference they have in mind …

In literature and film, an antagonist is a character or force that actively works against the protagonist or main character. Think of them as a roadblock with a clear purpose and well-defined reasons for their choices and actions. The antagonist may be an institutional force, such as an oppressive government, or an individual, such as a villainous mentor or a romantic rival. Antagonists can also be nature itself, such as in the case of a severe drought or a hungry animal.

I don’t like this definition because the last two sentences contradict the first two sentences. A severe drought does not actively work against the protagonist and certainly does not have a purpose or a reason for its choices. All of that is nonsense when thinking of a force of nature (unless nature is thoroughly personified in your fantasy world). One word would fix this. That word is “also,” as in, “The antagonist may ALSO be an institutional force or nature itself.” But it’s simpler to say: the antagonist is someone or something the protagonist needs to overcome. That avoids the whole question of whether the antagonist is a person or a force of nature.

Meanwhile, villains:

A villain is an amoral or evil character with little to no regard for the general welfare of others. They are driven by ambition, greed, lust, or a desire for power or revenge.

Yes, that’s the same as my quickie definition: a bad person working against your protagonist.

As a rule, I don’t like villains. I prefer antagonists. That is, for example, in the Griffin Mage trilogy —

Which is, I notice, on sale for $1.99 for the entire trilogy as I write this post.

You know what, that is an amazingly good deal and any of you who don’t already have this trilogy and do read on a Kindle ought to click through right this minute and pick it up. In fact, I myself bought this trilogy as a Kindle omnibus because I may have a zillion copies of the mass market paperback version sitting on shelves, but if I personally go back and read it, I’m going to want an ebook edition. And here it is, practically free.

Anyway, I don’t really know how readers feel about the king of Casmantium. He totally started a war out of sheer ambition because he thought he could win and that would be a fine thing. To me, however, he is not a villain. He’s an antagonist. Yes, he’s ambitious, but he’s really out to improve his own country’s prosperity and that makes him a good ruler in my book, provided he’s generally competent, which he is.

Or how about Beguchren, the cold mage? He and the other cold mages absolutely started a genocidal campaign to try to wipe out the griffins. They sure did. And they almost succeeded, too. Is Beguchren a villain? In the first book, pretty much! In the second book, not at all! I, as the author, knew from the beginning that Beguchren wasn’t really a villain even though he sure looked like a villain in the first book.

Why aren’t they villains? Because they are in fact striving to better the general welfare of their people. They aren’t amoral or evil, definitely not selfish or petty. Ambitious, yes. Mistaken, also yes — at least Beguchren was terribly mistaken. But not villains. The only villains in the trilogy are from Linularinum and we barely see them. I recall some reviews were like “villains were barely present and boring” or something in that general line, and well, yes, I wasn’t very interested in the villains. They were plot devices and largely offscreen. The antagonists, yes. They were very much more interesting and fun for me.

This isn’t to say that I’ve never featured a villain. I totally have. But I prefer really creepy, hard to understand villains such as Lillienne in The City in the Lake. She’s terrifying, or at least if I had to try to defeat her, I would certainly find her terrifying. But she’s not, let me see, what’s that string of adjectives …. driven by ambition, greed, lust, or a desire for power or revenge. We don’t know what’s driving Lillienne. She’s so removed from normal human experience that we can only guess that maybe she might be motivated by a desire for power. She definitely does seem amoral. But it’s hard to tell. She’s just really creepy.

Lorellan is, of course, a villain. He was actually fairly difficult to write. When I wrote Tuyo, I skipped over the initial meeting with him and everything in those chapters, moved ahead to the escape scene, wrote most of the rest of the book, and then finally went back and wrote those middle chapters with Lorellan later. I did that even though he’s so over the top evil that he wasn’t that hard. Ordinary banal evil and petty selfishness is quite a bit harder for me — I don’t think I’ve ever written an important character like that.

Come to think of it, Keziah’s story in Black Dog Stories II was also very difficult to write. Her terrible family is chock full of villains and that was really difficult. This was one of the slowest pieces of writing I’ve ever finished. I knew what I wanted to do with it, or I wouldn’t have finished it. In fact, if I hadn’t known what I wanted to do with it, I wouldn’t have started it in the first place.

Let me remind you that the Black Dog series is on sale through the 25th. This is a good chance to pick up these books if you don’t have them or add the story collections if you skipped over them or anything like that.

However, back to the main topic — antagonists and villains!

One of my very favorite tropes is the situation where there’s one important protagonist and one important antagonist and both of them are striving for mutually exclusive goals. They’re both good people, or could be seen that way; and they’re both self-sacrificing and determined and competent; but the situation forces them into opposition. And then the author cleverly forces them into alliance and they wind up both winning somehow. I realize this is seriously tricky for the author to pull off. But I love this situation. What are some SFF novels where we see this?

1) One could certainly view the third Griffin Mage book through this lens. I mentioned the Kindle omnibus is massively on sale, right?

2) The Death of a Necromancer, and of course this is a major reason I love this book and very particularly love the scenes with Nicholas and Ronsarde.

3) Your example here.

I know I have various other examples of this trope on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t think of them. So … what am I forgetting? Please drop suggestions in the comments.

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Recent Reading: The Tally-Keeper by JM Ney-Grimm

So, this is a book by a new-to-me author. She posted nice reviews of some of my books and I thought okay, that suggests comparable tastes, so I picked up one of her books.

What with one thing and another, it took me some time to get through The Tally-Master, but I finished it last night.

What stands out:

The setting. This novel takes place almost entirely in the citadel of Belzetarn, a massive, towering citadel on top of a cliff above a lake. There are lots and lots of stairs allowing traffic up and down the tower, and I seriously feel that I climbed them all personally, multiple times. I haven’t read a lot of novels where the setting had such a powerful physical presence. We also get lots of views out of windows and plenty of glimpses of the various smithies (there are three) and kitchens and so forth. The sense of place is just tremendous. I practically got tired just reading about everyone running up and down those stairs.

The Regenen Stair was the tallest in the citadel, a spiral rooted in the mead cellars below the kitchen annex and climbing all the tower’s great height, past the lofty chambers of the regenen – Lord Carbraes – to the battlements. There were three other major stairways that ascended from the smithies to the battlement terraces, and all four of them were heavily trafficked, with warriors climbing from the bailey to one of several places of arms or to the march’s war chamber, porters carrying charcoal from the yard to the many tower living quarters, or messengers running errands for the catellanum who managed the domestic logistics of Belzetarn. …

It was a long descent to the tower gate, and Gael’s weak left ankle clicked. Not that his tally chamber perched anywhere near Belzetarn’s battlements. But the view from its arrowslits was a scary height above the artisans’ yard and the warriors’ bailey.

Passing two upward-bound porters carrying a heavy chest, Gael moved to the outside of the treads where they were so broad as to require an extra step to reach the riser. He had to duck an empty torch bracket. It would be filled, come nightfall, but the sunlight shining in through the open arrowslits provided illumination enough by day.

So, yes, there are lots of stairs and we climb up them and run down them many, many times over the course of this story.

Who lives in the citadel?

Trolls. When troll-disease strikes someone, he (or she) is exiled, and if the newly made troll lives long enough, he may wind up at Belzetarn. Women with troll-disease may, if they’re lucky, wind up elsewhere; Belzetarn is not a good place for a woman. Troll-disease is a malady that imposes increasing physical and mental distortion as time passes. Trolls and unafflicted humans are at continual war, with Belzetarn a bastion of troll military strength. Why the unafflicted humans don’t kill every single person afflicted with troll-disease isn’t clear to me … well, it kind of is. After all, the newly afflicted troll is someone’s friend, someone’s child, someone’s brother. On the other hand, if humans immediately executed trolls, this war would probably not be such a big concern. But maybe the conflict is usually low-level enough that this makes sense. This is not the part we see. We’re focused on Belzetarn and most particularly with the manufacture of bronze weapons from tin and copper.

The tally-keeper, the secretarious, is the person responsible for keeping track of supplies of these metals. This leads us to –

The characters. Also, the plot.

Gael is the secretarious of Belzetarn. He manages the flow of metal from the mines to the forges, tracking every ingot of tin and copper. Somebody is stealing ingots of metal. Who could it be? What is that person’s motivation? This is where the story opens.

So this is a fantasy-mystery. I really enjoyed how the mystery unfolded. I don’t want to give too much away, but this gets complicated and there are various surprises along the way, including at least one late revelation that I ought to have figured out long before the reveal, but didn’t. And one character-based revelation that nobody is going to figure out, but that particularly appealed to me because it involved a shift from enemy to ally. That was handled smoothly, and of course I always particularly enjoy it when an author does this at all, especially when it’s well done.

Anyway, this is a long, complicated story – complicated in some ways – not hard to follow, but there’s a lot going on and events and revelations kind of pile up.

Gael himself is a solid protagonist. He’s in a tough position, morally speaking. He’s not himself fighting against unafflicted humans, but he’s helping trolls fight, and is that right? No. Yet would it be okay to turn against the trolls who trust him and against the regenen of Belzetarn, who is a bulwark against anarchy and barbarism? Also no. So he’s been handling this dilemma for some years by basically trying not to think about it.

Gael’s assistant is Keir, a young man – troll – who is cool, collected, competent, and – spoiler! –

Here comes a spoiler!

– a young woman pretending to be a boy. I know, I know, that IS a spoiler, but! (A) it’s revealed early … okay, fairly early, about a quarter of the way through the story, when Keir also becomes an important pov character, and (B) this is a trope that particularly appeals to me, and the moment this revelation occurred, my interest in the story instantly went up by about 30%.

Before that, I was reading a bit here and a bit there. After that, I was considerably more interested and I read the rest of the story much faster. I decided I’d provide this spoiler in case any of you also especially enjoy this trope.

I liked Keir a lot. I liked the relationship between Gael and Keir, which did not shift into romance territory in this book, but my guess is it’s heading that way in a very, very slow-burn sort of way. I liked a bunch of things that sort of wrap around the periphery of this relationship, including an intensification of Gael’s central moral dilemma.

And I guess I’ll stop there or I would probably tend to say too much about the plot.

There are lots of characters and it might be helpful to know there’s a dramatis personae in the back, along with quite a handful of other appendices.

What about the writing?

Smooth, solid, and sometimes really nice. As lyrical as Patricia McKillip? No. Evocative of the setting? Yes.

Anything else?

This is a fairly slow-paced story, so if you want a breakneck pace, this isn’t the novel for you. It’s an easy novel to read rather slowly, setting it aside to do other things, so if that’s what you want right now, here you go.

Themes include trust and forgiveness, both of which appeal to me a lot; and the difficulty of finding a moral path forward when you’re surrounded by conflicting duty that pulls you in different directions. That appeals to me a lot too.

This novel includes quite a few extended flashbacks, the first of which occurred only 5% into the story and seriously turned me off. I don’t particularly like extended backstory flashbacks anyway, and in this case, we find out how Gael became a troll. It involved the king to whom Gael was loyal handling a situation in a way that was both stupid and morally highly questionable. I came really close to stopping with this book at that point. Gael thinks, basically, If the king was going to reconcile with his brother in the end, why in hell couldn’t he do it before without putting the kingdom through a year of civil war? And you know what, that’s a very good question. My patience with a king who would do that is minimal, as in, zero. That king did not deserve Gael’s, or anyone’s, loyalty, even if the brother was worse.

However, that’s the only situation like that. Even though I just skimmed through all but one – okay, two – flashback scenes, I’m glad I didn’t quit reading when I hit that first flashback. The present-day story takes up most of the book. I liked the ending – I liked how Gael handled problems of loyalty and duty right at the end.

 I’m curious about how various elements might get resolved, I’m invested in the relationship between Gael and Keir, and I bought the sequel, which I’m reading now.

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On Sale: The Black Dog series

I’m running a promotion for the Black Dog series for the next three days. If you haven’t got these books and you think you might like to try them at some point, this is a good time to pick them up.

The first couple are free, all the rest have been dropped way down.

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Update: So, this is unexpectedly complicating my life

Okay, so Monday the 22nd is the first day of the Fall semester. This is fine. I have a predictable part-time schedule and can easily take time off when —

Phone call: Rachel! Can you please teach a General Biology class this semester!

Me: Long, reluctant pause.

Phone call: We really need you to take this class! Tuesday / Thursday at a time that will totally interfere with your ordinary job! But it’s okay, we’ll work it out!

Me: Loooong, very reluctant pause.

But here we are. I guess I’m teaching this class, starting tomorrow. This all happened at the end of last week, with just days to get things in order for the beginning of the semester. I’m still, even today, in an intense flurry of getting things ready, although I did figure out how to remove the other instructor’s syllabus from the course page and put mine in its place. I think.

Did not see that coming. It’s definitely going to be awkward to work this out without utterly destroying my highly prized part-time schedule. I have warned the department coordinator and division chair that if Naamah has puppies, there is substantial risk of a sudden absence at the beginning of October. I also (reluctantly) assured them that I would develop an out-of-class assignment to cover one or two class periods if necessary.

I like the teaching part. The hasty, last minute scramble, not so much. The impact on my schedule, not at all. Well … it’s only one semester. It had better be only one semester.

Meanwhile! Tasmakat update!

So, yes, this Biology thing is already in the way. I expect a significant slowdown. Though this doesn’t exactly count as an Act-of-God disaster, it’s definitely a complication. I … kind of don’t know if I’ll have this draft finished by October. Maybe by November. In a week or two, I guess I’ll have a better idea of how all this is going to work.

Also, before all this happened, I went back to fill in a gap and fiddle around with some stuff, with the result that we’re still in Avaras, which I grant is disappointing.

Although I’m definitely peeved about this, I will add, I did write 190,000 words of this book, more or less, since the middle of June. (When I picked it up in June, I already had 40,000 words). So it’s not like I can complain about the work going too slowly. It’s been thoroughly satisfying. Even if it slows down now, I really do hope I will have it finished well before Christmas Break begins. That would be great, as I have other things I would like to work on during Christmas Break. But even if Tasmakat drags on into December, this has still been a satisfying couple of months.

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On Sale: The Black Dog series

I’m running a promotion for the Black Dog series for the next four days. If you haven’t got these books and you think you might like to try them at some point, this is a good time to pick them up.

The first couple are free, all the rest have been dropped way down.

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