Kim Harrison's Blog, page 96

I'm liking this Friday thing

It's Friday, and boy am I ready for it.  Yesterday's explosion of the plot for book 12 went extremely well.  Right during my morning work I finally found the missing element that tied into both the story plot and the emotional plot.  It created the four chapters worth of material that I needed and it fit in super with what I was aiming for.  I had to sharpen my five pencils three times to get it all down instead of the usual once, but it's done and I'm ready to rock and roll.

It never ceases to amaze me how the subconscious can juggle handfuls of "stuff" and in one "ah ha!" moment, create an option that takes care of three things at once.  It reminds me of how many authors become overnight successes after 20 years of work–an entire week of work distilled into six hours of reconstruction, and a plot is born.

If you're in Michigan, you probably got socked with freezing temps last night.  I covered two of my most tender plants, a climbing hydrangea and a small cherry tree.  The cherry tree will be fine even if I didn't cover it, but I might have lost this year's cherries, and I have a feeling that this year's crop might be damaged.  (MI is a big producer of them, like FL and oranges.)  It's supposed to freeze tonight as well.  I'm still going to play in the dirt.

I hope that your Easter and/or Passover are joyful and full of good stuff.  :-)  I love it when the holidays coincide so closely.  It feels very back to the roots to me.

Robin Watch April 5

If you've been watching the drama box, you might remember last week I put up a bird shelf under my eaves for the robin who had been thinking of building a nest on the one-inch window sill.  After three days of checking it out, she instead chose to build in the old bush right behind me.  :-)  How cool is that?

So now I have a behind-the-back view of what hopefully doesn't become too much drama.  I don't see too many cats back here, so maybe there is hope.  Guy was the first one to spot her early this week, and I watched her first collect twigs, and then yesterday, mud to finish it.  I came together amazingly fast.

Sort of like this plot for book 13, which is the new 12, actually.  (nice segue, eh?)  I've got a very nice chapter-by-chapter outline done, but it has problem, and last night I thought about all the faults it has.  Today I'm going to explode it open and try to put it back together.  This is where my character grid comes in handy, helping me keep track of when I see someone so they can bring in whatever piece of information Rachel needs.  Once it's exploded, it's a mess, but if I can go back and see that Edden calls in chapter five, we see him in six, seven, and twelve, I know that whatever new thing I need him to bring into the story has to be in those areas and go right to them for repairs.  It also tells me when I have too many chapters crunched into a day, (which is what I'm running into now) and when I'm seeing too much, or too little of a character.  (For example, f the story isn't about Quen, he doesn't need to be there in six chapters, and I can give his "lines" to someone else who does.)  It also helps make sure I don't have three chapters in a row take place in the same location, and that there is a flow from place to place, sunrise, to sunset.

So today I'm ripping it apart and putting it back together.  Right after I make a list of what's wrong with it and a second list of a few more quirky things I didn't manage to fit in the first time.  I'm going to need a steady stream of caffein today–and lots of it.  I have to get it all done today, or it will take me an hour to pick up my train of thought tomorrow.

P.S.  Planted a row of asparagus last night.  The small patch I put in the ground last year did so well, I'm going to try for more.  Weeding out maple seeds kind of came to a halt once I realized the ground by the drive was dry enough to work.  Yay!

Hollows Graphic Novel Blood Crime

Blood Work has been out for a while, and the word is that Blood Crime will be out October 31st.  Yay!  I've been waiting for ages for this to come out, having finished the script over a year ago to allow for the original artist's slow pace.  But alas, he was unable to take on the project despite my efforts, so Gemma, the woman who did the coloring in Blood Work, took on that responsibility, and the style remained unchanged. I am delighted with her work, and it all turned out fabulous.

Like Blood Work, this one has a few special add-ins at the end where you can see an actual page or two of script and how it was translated to pictures. I don't plan on going anywhere to celebrate the release for Blood Crime, but I will try to arrange at least signed books through Nicola's.  More on that as we get closer to the release date.

Barnes and Noble

Books-A-Million

Indi Bound Books

Amazon

I had a great day yesterday at the plotting, and had a huge surprise when Rachel got caught by a curfew and had to go home on horseback . . . through the ever-after on the surface.  I have got to paint the picture of Ivy with her cup of coffee, blearily staring out the kitchen window and shouting, "Why is there a horse in the graveyard?"  Can't you just see it?  The sun catching the horse's whiskers and the steam from her breath.  Pixies darting over her and her ears going back when they got too close?  Yes . . . I can see that.

Peanut butter Jelly time!

Yesterday was national peanut butter and jelly sandwich day, so of course I celebrated by having a gooey,  sloppy PB&J.  My favorite is made with raspberry and the peanut butter so thick you can almost not eat it.  It takes a lot of milk.

I had other plans for this week, but I find myself back at my desk with my computer turned off, plotting out another book.  Fortunately I can use a lot of the prewriting research that I did for the first book I plotted out since I'm setting this new one in the old timeframe.  Sunrise, -set, moonrise -set, moon phase, average temperatures are all the same.  And even the first chapter I wrote can be used with a little tweaking.  Even so, I'm not really happy with that first chapter.  It's not unusual for my first chapter to be completely rewritten between rough draft and submission, so I try not to get too uptight about it and simply use that first chapter as a way to get into the story.  Fix it later.  :-)  I've got a very rough character grid sketched out, and a rough day-by-day breakdown of what I want to see.  Today I'll be taking that and fleshing it out into real chapters, hopefully bringing in some of the fun stuff I wanted to do.  Again, it feels skimpy, but I've got a couple of new, unexpected characters, and that always shakes things up.

I bugged out of the office an hour early yesterday so I could weed out a few of the landscape beds.  It felt good to get my dirt pants on and my face turned to the ground–and the physical labor forced a few ideas out into the open where I can work with them today.  I told Guy I was yanking the dandelions from around the bushes so we can leave them where they belong in the yard, and he wasn't amused.  I believe his exact words were "We're not going to make wine out of them!"

Bakers Dozen

It's official.  I've been saying that the Hollows will end at 12 or 13, and after a couple of weeks plotting out book 12, I realize there's a book 13 in there to get to the ending I want.  :-)  So it's back to my index cards and handwritten pages for another week to plot this baby out since it comes first.  I'll be borrowing a bit of the character movement from the previously plotted book because it's time to move forward with a few things, but for the most part, I'll be touching on a few issues that need settling before I call it quits.  It felt rushed, and now it doesn't.

I hope you all had a great April 1st.  I think Mother Nature is having the last laugh on me.  I got outside maybe once, and it was miserable and cold.  The sun never came out, and the ground was too wet to work with.  I'm frustrated and in a bad mood, which is not a good way to start your work week.  But it's warm in my office.  I've got six orchids that are blooming and some of my seeds I've started have germinated.  Four of the orchids started blooming way back in early Feb and are just about done, but two just opened up and should be with me for a while yet.  One that I though was on his way out decided to push out a few more buds, which has the potential to make this the longest blooming orchid I've ever had.

The orchid I've got picture here is really cool.  Unlike a lot of orchids that open up a new bud every few weeks or so, this one opens them all up at once.  I think they look like birds coming down on prey.  They have a very delicate scent, too.  Mud can tell me what it is.  I don't remember.  -laugh-

Gettin' ready for the weekend

It's going to be hard sitting in my office today, but the threatened rain is going to help.  Hopefully it's going to be warm enough I can open a window.  The sound of rain, like crickets, is always conducive to work.  And thanks to Guy and my agent, I am tired and cranky this morning.  They combined to put a bug of an idea in my bonnet, which made sleep difficult.  Mulled, and weighed, and finally threw the idea out as unworkable at about two in the morning before falling asleep, but it did spark another that I will be taking a solid, paper look at today.  Last night was not a waste of time by any stretch of the imagination, and I'm thankful for both my agent and husband for the muse-fule.   A paper look means that it's already passed the is-this-going-to-make-Rachel-grow test, and unfortunately despite being shiny and attractive, and a whole lot of fun, the idea I was mulling over last night did nothing for Rachel's character growth.  But the idea it spawned did.

And so the plot bunnies burn.

I'll be working on plotting today, seeing if my new rock of an idea has a diamond in it or if it's just a rock.  But even if it's just a rock, that doesn't mean it's worthless.  Rocks are great for breaking glass houses.

Slowing spring down

Earlier this month, we were up in the high 70s, not unheard of, but very, very unusual for March, especially to have it last almost a week.  Most of the crocus and daffodils bloomed.  Many of the flowering trees did as well, and the maple trees flowered, turning their crowns a delicate red or yellow.  All the decidious foundation bushes leafed out, and then–as it tends to do in Michigan–it got cold.  Just in time, I think, to save most of the trees from making a big mistake.

If I remember right, I think maples are phototropic, which means they flower and leaf out according to how much light we are getting, not the temperature. But you know temps fit in there somewhere. We're not done yet with the cool temperatures, but I think we might squeak by with no frost.  If we're lucky.

Someone told me that the large quakes we got last year shifted the earth's tilt by 2 degrees.  I'd really like to know if that is true, because if it is, that might be what we're seeing–if it's not just simply rising global temps. Which is what I'm tending toward, actually.  I've also heard from several sources that our zone map has shifted warmer, which I'd believe as fast as a Fraggle falls asleep at the drop of  a hat.  Still . . . trusting that the last frost date has shifted two weeks is hard.  We've never put in our annuals until memorial day, and the chart I found this year puts the last average frost at April 10th for Ann Arbor.

Anyway . . .  I covered a few bushes the other night when it was supposed to drop down to 26, but after a quick look at the long-range weather, I pulled them off and will just keep a close eye on them.  Most plants can take a little cold, but all my plants are new in the ground, and they don't have a lot of reserves.  But I'm glad it cooled off.  As I said, a lot of trees and bushes are flowering, and as long as it stays cool, they will keep their color.  :-)

It makes it very hard to look at my yard, though, and know it's too cold to play.

Robin watch: She checked out the nest platform again this morning, but again, moved on immediately.

Five days in a row

One of the nice parts of my new office area is that I get to see the sun rise every morning.  It does a lot to wake me  up and I get to see where it rises change and the angle of it shift, almost weekly.  I'm very sun/season oriented, and seeing it move in a predicted and familiar pattern does a lot to keep me grounded in the now, especially when I'm working so much out of my head, making it winter or fall or such.

But being awake and in the same spot every morning has benefits, as in watching other animals going about their business, their actions changing with the angle of the sun.  For four days now, there has been a frustrated robin hopping along the gutter line of the garage.  I've watched her hop down to the bend in the downspout, checking it out to see if it might be a good spot to build a nest, and then awkwardly hopping down the old door rail still left on the side of the garage right under the eaves where the sliding door hung before they put in an electronic one, estimating her chances at building there.  It kills me knowing that even if she makes one, one of the neighborhood cats is going to knock it down like last year when she built in a hanging basket, (twice) or baring that, a jay will pluck out the babies one by one if she's not attentive enough.

And yet . . .

If she is hoping, willing to try . . . How can I sit and do nothing?

So yesterday I bent a couple of little metal fences in a shallow cup, wired them together, and wedged them into the rail as a platform.  A few evergreen sticks that I trimmed from last week will give her a base to start from, and we will see.  It will be difficult for a cat to reach, and so there is only the jays and crows to be aware of.  That, I can do nothing about, as at least the dead go to support the living, unlike the cat who let the babies die of exposure on the ground.

Today, I watched the robin check it out, hopping in and out before she flew away–and it made me feel good.  Grounded.  A part of something bigger than just me.  It's too soon to be building nests, but she knows it's there, knows I'm watching through the window.  We'll see.  It would be nice to have something other than the sun's shifting patterns to ground me this summer.

Book Perk offer

I've got something fun for you today.  Harper has made A Perfect Blood part of their Book Perk program, which means they're offering bookplate-signed copies with one of Rachel's pack  temporary tattoo for the low price of $16.99 until they run out.  (Price includes domestic shipping, making the offer available only in the US.)  So for the price of two paperbacks, you can have a hardcover right now and skip the wait until October.  Feel free to pass this on!  :-)

Book Perk Offer

I had a great day at the keyboard yesterday, warming up and finding the mindset of dialog, text, eat, sleep–dialog, text, eat, sleep.  I love writing rough draft, but it can be grueling even as it's exhilarating.  It's often like reading a book for the first time where you know what's going to happen, and then something different does, or a look between two characters turns into something you weren't expecting, and you get to write it as it unfolds, naturally and without expectation. But first . . .

I've got the line proofs from the next graphic novel Blood Crime scheduled to land on my desk this week. (Due out the last day of October.  Click to pre-order).  I have a cover to show you now.  Isn't it beautiful? and the copy-edit for the Harrison anthology Into The Woods is going to arrive as well.  (Due out October 9, click to pre-order.) I've got a cover for this one, too!  So I'm not hammering at my first chapter as hard as I otherwise might.  Once these two are out of the way, there's the editorial rewrite for Ever-After, AND THEN I'm rocking and rolling on this latest book.  :-)  But the outlining is done.  All that's left is the actual work.

Monday, Monday

I've got my outlines and chapter breakdowns in hand for  book 12 of the Hollows.  It had a few surprises along the way, and I'm looking forward to finding even more as I go along with the rough draft.  It still feels a little light, coming in at about 24 chapters, but I know it will plump up as I go.  One of the best parts is I'm not introducing any new characters at all, except perhaps a few walk-on demons.  Bad part is from here on out, I'm not giving any hints as to who is there, who isn't, and so on.  And asking me to do this or that isn't going to help because it's outlined and it is what it is.  If you thought I was closed-lipped before, you will probably be somewhat peeved when I pull out KSR1 again.  (Kim's Standard Response #1-I'm not telling.)

So this morning I'll be cleaning my desk of all the eraser rolls and turning on the computer for a good stint of work.  It's not had a workout for about a month between tour and plotting, and it should be interesting seeing chapter one firm up from my one page break down.  I can't wait for all the surprises.  Ready, set . . . go!