Update: Tasmakat

All right, so I really thought I’d have nothing to say this morning.

a) I spent a lot of time last week reading The Golden Enclaves (which was fantastic, yay!)

b) I spent practically all of Saturday at Archon (which was perfectly fine, and I greatly appreciate all your suggestions for the panels!)

c) Have I mentioned that I’m taking my mother to physical therapy a couple times a week? She’s doing okay, but that has a big impact on how much time I have in the morning.

d) The dratted biology class. I will (probably) complain about it less in another week or so, after we hit mitosis/meiosis/genetics, particularly genetics. I really love genetics! But at the moment, do you realize I was compelled to assign a lab report? (It’s in the syllabus.) (I know, I could have taken it out, but I guess it’s okay to provide this one experience in writing a lab report, plus some students could really use the extra points in a take-home assignment.) (But now I’m going to have to grade the dratted thing. It will take hours to grade 20-plus lab reports, and they will be much more boring than, say, an equal number of English Comp I essays.)

However, all that aside, I actually made a lot of progress on Tasmakat! That’s because I wrote almost 9000 words on Sunday.

Wow, you may be saying, I bet that means Rachel finally wrote the big revelation scene where we find out the truth about certain important things!

No. I thought I was going to, but instead I wrote a scene that I didn’t see coming, plus associated scenes.

I won’t tell you anything about it, except that Aras snaps, “You stubborn Ugaro, I won’t let you do something you so vehemently don’t want to do!” And Ryo answers, with just as much force, “You arrogant Lau, I will not permit you to make a decision that rightfully belongs to me!”

So that was a tense moment. Aras walked out and Ryo made his own decision, and then we moved on with the consequences of that.

And this morning, I finally began the big revelation scene. I jumped over a hopefully short transition scene to get to it. I’m going to try a new strategy this week: on weekdays, jump over everything transitional, everything doubtful, everything I’m not sure about, and write the scenes that I most want to write. Then go back on the weekend and fill in the transitional material and figure out the difficult stuff. I think — I hope — that will mean I get more done per week. Here we are in October! I would LOVE to be writing THE END by the end of this month, or at least pretty close to it.

Other things that are taking time: I’m also beta-reading another book for Sherwood Smith, the third book of the Norsunder War series, and reading an unpublished book for Kay Kenyon with an eye to providing a blurb, and wow, I just feel really busy right now.

Oh, I’ll comment a bit about the above two books:

Sherwood Smith’s series is omniscient viewpoint and we get roughly a thousand different points of view. I’m much more engaged with some than with others. I’ve read a good many recent books in this huge set of linked series, so I’m deeply invested in some of the plotlines, while I care a lot less about others. However, the second book hit many, many buttons for me with a whole bunch of my favorite characters, so I’ve been looking forward very much to the third book. It’ll be four books total, I believe. I bet I see the fourth this year. She’s very fast.

Kay Kenyon’s book is interesting because I picked it up while writing all these posts on Positive Fantasy. This is totally not that, and it’s been, as I say, interesting. I found myself thinking very explicitly, “Are these people EVER going to be NICE to each other?” The answer is, as far as I can tell, is basically no. However, the main character has now discovered she has magic powers, and some people around her are at least looking like they might become allies, though personally I wouldn’t trust any of them as far as I could throw them at this point.

Great cover, I will add:

It’s one of those novels that’s very YA, but too slow paced for YA, so it’s adult fantasy. I ought to write a post about that, because there are quite a lot of fantasy novels that I think fit that description — YA but slow paced. Anyway, hopefully I’ll wind up really enjoying this book. I’ll certainly let you all know if so.

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