P.C. Hodgell's Blog, page 22

Wow

Wow, you folk have really reminded me of all the ends I've left danging. Yes, I do mean to tie up as many of them as I can, if not all in the next book. At some point I've got to send Jame back to Tai-tastigon, for example. Tori has got to get his head on straight(er) and Kindrie now has at least a chapter in the next book (as does Tori), as well as several guest appearances. Did I not make clear that Greshan was gone with the burning of the coat that, death banner-like, had trapped his so...

tagmeth @ 2010-03-02T14:00:00

Oh, I also finished the Maine Coon stained glass



And a modular vest for my step-mother.



Hence I'm again open for commissions. Knitting would be especially welcome. I knit way too fast and I'm addicted to yarn. To glass too, I guess.

And I'm giving a reading/signing in West Bend WI March 20.

Tweets

Baen (http://twitter.com/BaenBooks) has started my tweets re:Bound in Blood, which describe the first half of the novel from various points of view in roughly 50 tweets. I agree that tweeting is inherently kind of silly, and so are my tweets. Still, they were fun to write and perhaps will interest new readers.

Hopefully most of you are getting your copies of Bound in Blood by now. I'll be curious to know what you think of it, given that it's the middle book of a trilogy in the middle of a s...

Brainstorming

Many thanks for all of the suggestions. I've printed them out and am going over them carefully. Already I can see one problem: I've started the chapter at the wrong point. Backing it up will allow for the inclusion of several of the suggested ideas. A bigger problem is that the novel as plotted so far ends with Tori doing something stupid re: Jame. He does learn by it, though, so maybe that's all right. It's my experience that sometimes it takes something dramatic to alter a mind that'...

Argh

What can one say about a day that starts with stepping on broken glass? Luckily it was just a shard and easily removed, but there's a trail of bloody foot prints between my studio and the bathroom. Then I get a glorious nose-bleed, possibly from inhaling lead fumes while soldering stained glass (yes, I know they're dangerous; I do try to take precautions). Then I first step on my laptop, then drop it. No damage done, thank goodness.

But worst of all, I've got writer's block.

It's a chapter...

Big Idea Yet Again

My thanks for all the constructive criticism. I've taken much of it, revised, and sent off the resulting essay for John's consideration. We'll see what he thinks of it. I don't know why such a simple task made me so edgy -- perhaps because part of it turned out to be more personal than I expected and this is a different audience, as you quite rightly remind me. Some of the responses to the column today made me cringe, and I didn't even write it. But the main thing is to get some extra pu...

Big Idea Redux

I think Catsittingstill and Estara make good points. The organization bothered me too in that it slides across several main ideas, but I can't seem to help that as they dovetail together. I'm thinking of dropping the list of previous novels altogether and just putting a note at the end that Baen is also reissuing them. That will bring the theme of "What do we owe the dead" and the current novel into more immediate prominence. It's still not brilliant, but I hope that it will do.

What do we...

The Big Idea

Baen has asked for a potentially more productive bit of promotion than the tweeter. John Scalzi has issued an open call for writers to participate in his "The Big Idea" feature on his blog. This was mentioned to me before by readers. I'm willing to try, although I don't know much about said blog beyond the outline which he gives. The following is my proposed submission. Do you think it will do?

Big Idea

Looking back over a thirty-four year career, I don't think that I've ever started with...

Twitter

Thanks for the suggestions. I could see Lyra tweeting about the parts of the story that she knows, but am not sure how she would know enough about the rest. This is the example that Baen sent me, tweeting between Honor Harrington and her cat Nimitz:

BaenBooks: itzNimitz—must find where the humans' secret stash of celery is. #Honorverse
7:39pm Oct. 1st

BaenBooks: itzHonor—Stinker looks full of himself, must have found celery. #Honorverse
10:50pm Oct. 1st

BaenBooks: itzNimitz—@itzHonor doesn't ...

Happy Hollidays!

A belated Happy Holidays to you all!

Here it was pretty quiet. I miss not having any family within reach, except for my four cats, thirty (hibernating) fish, and one hyper horse. I wonder if other writers have more of a social life or if most of us are hermits huddled around our computers. What a dismal thought. Still, the story keeps unrolling. I'm about one third through the first draft of the next novel, fighting it every line of the way. Timmon has just found out the truth about hi...