Rachel Hartman's Blog, page 40

Mark the date and time

Today I finally fell in love with the sequel.

Ye gods that took a shockingly long time!

You've noticed me struggling (remember when I dropped 70 pages?). I like to bring my difficulties out into the light and examine them, partly because doing so can jostle new ideas loose, partly because I think it's instructive for aspiring writers to see me struggle. Then you can say to yourself, Wow, if a chronic bumbler like that can write a novel and get published, maybe there's hope for me after all!

Ther...

I battle the wiggles

(That title will inevitably make some of you imagine me engaged in an epic struggle against these guys. In fact, it's such an amusing image, I almost want to leave it at that — perhaps with an apology for putting that song in your head. It should only last month or two, until you happen to see a big red car somewhere.)

Back when I was in college, I read an essay by Daniel Pinkwater about his writing process. He used the "Butt in Chair" method: you park your butt in a chair and you don't let...

Bitter November

I don't know what it is, but November always wipes me out. Every year.

It's a hard time of year for me. The rains set in in earnest (which is serious, here in Vancouver); everything feels like an uphill slog. If I were astrologically inclined – which I am not – I'd have some theory about Scorpio being out to get me with pincers and stinger, and then old Sagittarius finishing off what's left of me with his bow. In the absence of hocus-pokery, I guess I have to assume it's some kind of tedious d...

I think, possibly too hard, about Twilight

With the release  of Breaking Dawn (the film), strong feelings about the Twilight series have once again risen back to the fore on blogs and discussion forums. Now, though, there's a backlash against the backlash. A metabacklash, if you will. The inimitable Holly Black has her finger on the pulse of an interesting argument, as always.

This got me thinking, as appears to be inevitable. I've had a Twilight post fermenting in my brain for some time, and while it's only tangentially related to...

British cover!

From Amazon.co.uk — it's kind of awesome!

Just so we're all completely clear: the US/Canadian cover will be nothing like this. I am not at liberty yet to say what it will be like, unfortunately. Still, this is very exciting for me.

Thanks to my husband for noticing it was up!

Ooh! That spooky eye!

Honey-sweet updates, like candy

* I dreamed that I'd written the sequel in Persian up to the halfway point, and was terribly stuck as a result. I couldn't even go back and read what I'd written, because it was all in Persian. I finally found someone who could translate it, but then the alarm went off before she was three sentences in.

* Now I'll never know what happened, which is too bad. It looked much more exciting in Persian, but then, maybe everything does.

* Did anyone catch the Simpsons on Sunday? It was so much like...

Listening to my inner Abdo

(This post is a continuation of this and this and this.) (Also: sorry it's taken me forever to put this up. It's been a really rough week on the writing front, as other problems have brought themselves to my attention. But as I always say – and as my friend Arwen had to remind me that I always say – writing is never wasted.)

I have a head full of humans.

I feel I've known some of them forever. In rewriting Seraphina so many times over the course of eight years, it's like I'm a director who's...

Minuscule updates

* Hello, darlings! I have returned from my weekend away, only to find that the world did not have the good grace to pause in my absence. Silly world! When will you ever learn? Rachel on vacation means you should definitely take a break as well, and not accumulate more things for me to do.

* I am working up my final knee-jerk blog post, but it is long and time is short. It will be up tomorrow, I hope.

* I am bending NaNo to my will, using an algorithm of my own devising to convert "Time Spent...

Second thoughts on NaNoWriMo

So! At it eleven days now, I've got more than 16K words written. This has been an interesting experiment, and I can't deny it's great to be as far into the book as I now am.

But.

This is not the way I write. I can only go so far forward before I have to go back and make things better. I get unhappy, otherwise. I start dragging my feet. The book is on to the next thing, but my brain is all I'm not done back there.

I see the point of turning off the "internal editor" if it's a cruel...

As boring as I want to be

So. Last time I said I had been particularly moved by that post at Seeking Avalon. I'd already read Elizabeth Bear's "Writing the Other" post, and I'd read meta-posts about the whole RaceFail scenario, so I thought I knew what to expect from Avalon's Willow. I expected strong words and anger; I expected to see Bear taken to task for being smug and patronizing.

I didn't expect to see Willow's broken heart laid out so clearly.

Her list is just relentless. Time and again, a Character of Colour is ...