And the Road Goes On, Seeming Ever Longer on the Way to Mandalay

talldogsSummer has been ushered in with strawberry picking.  "Caravanserai" is strumming its haunting notes from the second-generation speakers of my computer.  I have a candle burning on my desk beside a bouquet of flowers produced by magic from the hand of my husband.  I am (have I mentioned?) at the twelfth week of pregnancy and wondering if I am really going to be sick this morning or if I am just in for quietly nauseating misery. 

I was asked specifically if I could give an update on my writing, but I thought a general update would not go amiss.  Naturally, I have been exhausted and emotional to degrees I have not thought possible, so I have been doing less writing recently in a trucking-along kind of way, and a lot more plotting.  All things considered, Talldogs , which is my work in progress, is coming along nicely, and is currently weighing in at 76,637 words.  I am enjoying the process, when I am not so tired that I can barely care.  There is very little room for my enthusiasm after the story has been written; the writing process itself is what I love best, and the gradual exploration of characters and plot.  I could wax lyrical, but I feel shy about trilling my own excitement, so I don't believe I will.

My other stories do not keep quiet.  They take turns, with no rhyme or reason to their rhythm, piping up with scenes or plot ideas for me.  I have done a little scribbling on Drakeshelm recently because it gave me a monster of a scene and I did not dare ignore it for fear I forgot it, and I finally had a touch of a break-through with Lamblight the other morning while I was more or less comatose in the bath.  I had a break-through on Cruxgang , too, after a fashion - in that large chunk of night through which I can no longer seem to sleep - and that was encouraging.  I am very excited to begin that story because I love the colour and the feel of it, and lured by its aesthetic siren manipulations I keep scootching back to it to fiddle with research and daydream about scenes that are about as fantastic as they are ridiculous. 

I have three additional novels that are so far off that they aren't really within my sights yet: Amaranth, Ampersand, and Dondonné; they are pretty quiet, so I don't say much about them.  (Actually, I don't say much at all, do I...?  I was once told I was rather tight-lipped about all this, or held my cards close to my chest, or some such analogy.  I never considered that.)  You might catch a line or two from these three in my snippets posts.

Someone asked if I actually bought a house, or if I was joking.  No, I actually bought a house, and it is under renovation at present.  I can't tell you when we will be able to move in, but then I am not typically concerned by time, much as I sometimes should be, so I don't sweat it.  Tim says that it is not in the rurals, it's in the suburbs, but I still stand by my view that it is somewhere in between those two areas - this view backed by the fact that a chanticleer goes off every once in a while in the near district, and we saw a hen crossing the road.  No joke.  The house itself is a bewildered old ranch-style with an extended kitchen out the back and a large sunroom attached to one side, and now that the cramped wall-plans have been altered and much of the living space has been opened up by the magic which is my brother's renovation company, the whole place shines with sawdust and light.  We have nearly two acres of weedy construction-churned landscape, and the previous owner allows us use of his easement to get back to the river.  All this to say, I am really excited for this house.  I like to think we are one of the nicest things that could have happened to the poor thing.  I may even bore you with pictures later on, we'll have to see.

oh, and i'm working on self-publication for plenilune