It's just an ordinary day - Recent Entries

Say what you will about the Doctor Who finale, it's triggered off a boatload of plotbunnies in my brain. Way more than I have time to write! I'll have to see if I can whip up at least a few drabbles for some of these, though...

( Don't look back here if you haven't seen Journey's End yet... )

This is a bit early yet given that I've only begun to scratch the surface of my second draft revisions--but I wanted to start playing with a proper pitch for Queen of Souls. I'm putting this out on this journal rather than annathewriter for maximum potential replies, and also because some of y'all who made noises about beta reading for me don't read that journal.

If you were interested in beta reading before but wound up not having the time, or heck, if you just want to, take a peek and let me know if you think the pitch works. And if not, what I should do to it! This'll be a quick and easy way for you to contribute to the care and feeding of this novel.

( So would you buy this book or what? )

I have had very little brain for editing old words or writing new ones lately. To make up for this, I've been querying like mad. The problem with sending out a whole swath of queries is, of course, that the chances are very high that you'll get back a whole swath of rejection letters. Often several in the same week, if you're doing e-queries.

Which has led me to conclude that there must surely be a Writer's Law of some sort that says that persons who are not interested in your work will answer much, much more quickly than the ones who have even the remotest glimmer of interest. So far, the fastest turnaround times I've had on queries for Lament of the Dove have been for folks who have politely informed me within twenty-four hours that they are not the right people to represent my work. This week, I've gotten two!

Nevertheless, hope springs eternal, or perhaps in my case, grabs the nearest can of diet Mountain Dew as it struggles to keep itself awake. I've just discovered for myself the wonders of AgentQuery.com, which appears to be a tool even more awesome for writers than the Zokotou word meter. All you already-published and already-agented folks on my Friends list, this is the part where you grin tolerantly and think to yourselves, "A baby novelist! Isn't she cute?" ;) The rest of you, aspiring hopefuls like myself, go. Utilize AgentQuery.com. Search the hell out of it and start picking and choosing the agents who might be right for you.

Meanwhile, I've just tonight composed another query for Faerie Blood to punt it back out the door too. This brings me back up to a total of eight queries out, one for Faerie Blood and seven for Lament. I've just about run out of the agents I'm most interested in who are taking email queries, so I'm going to have to start firing up the paper mail real soon now.

In the meantime, okay, Inbox, I'm waiting. Bring it. I've got more diet Dew.

So get this, folks: the fine folks at greatbigsea.com have just put out a call to the fans for photos of "great accomplishments". Any they accept will be used in the forthcoming video for the single "Walk on the Moon".

I just sent them the three photos solarbird took of me and the full manuscript for Faerie Blood back in 2005, 'cause yeah--finishing a novel? Definite walk on the moon.

If I can't get that book sold, having its manuscript show up in a Great Big Sea video wouldn't suck. ;)

Two more queries are going out to agents tonight on Lament of the Dove. This will bring my open query count up to four, and will satisfy this week's quota of two queries sent. I need to poke through my list of agent site bookmarks and see who else takes email queries; I want to finish that list before I start on the snailmail.

Didn't do a bit of editing either on Friday night or yesterday, and blame for this rests thoroughly upon the shoulders of TV and of instrument fun. This did however mean that I had to edit a lot extra today, even during a Tricky Pixie show. Happily, solarbird found me a table in the cafe, ideal for parking Winnowill, and it was surprisingly productive to edit while surrounded by cheering people and with musicians in front of me. I did, however, get my ass up for "March of Cambreadth". Which was pretty much required.

The Tricky Pixie show was fun. Spotted several familiar faces there, of course: cflute and technoshaman were in attendance, as was kendaer and a few other old friends of mine and Dara's that we hadn't seen in a while. I'd never been to Soul Food Books before, but it has a neat stage in the corner, ideally sized for the trio of s00j and stealthcello and Alec. The place was thoroughly packed, though, which was extra special impressive given that there had been maybe two days' advance warning of this show. If that.

Best moments for me during the show were listening to the "Chickies in the House/Napoleon's Rant/Duncan's Dance" set and thinking "HAH we've been playing that in Jam!"--though not nearly so fast and not even remotely in one coherent whole yet. I have my ambitions about this now. D minor will be mine, oh yes. Also, the ninja song, which was very giggleworthy in the wake of the commentary last Jam about how we ought to do an all-ninja Jam to go with the pirate one. Now there exists an actual ninja song for us to do! ;)

After the show was a drum circle. Dara wanted to stay for that, so while she happily banged away on her little bodhran with the rest of the folks making thumpy noises, I wandered around the store to check the place out. I wound up getting another Skinny White Chick CD--specifically, the one to go with the Catherynne Valente book I've bought. I would have gotten Alec's all-instrumental CD, but Kore, his spouse, helpfully informed me that I actually already had all those tracks. Very nice of her. I'll just have to wait a little longer to get the next Alec disc, apparently! But I also got a chance to thank Alec directly for the songbook since we're having so much fun with the songs in that in Jam, and I got to chat with Betsy, and hang out outside with the laptop enjoying the Loud from a comfortable distance while I worked on a bit more editing.

Oh, and the editing tally? All the way through Chapter 1 and into Chapter 2 of Lament of the Dove. The productivity has continued into this evening, as I've gotten a couple more queries into the air and have therefore brought the active query count back up to three.

Meanwhile, I've kept at it tuning Rags to get the new strings to settle in, and I ran through "Elf Glade" and "Goin' Up" a few times. I think if I'm singing lead on either of these songs, I do it best capoed. "Elf Glade" is starting to come along nicely, though. Now if I can just get that meshing of lyrics and strum patterns down on "Goin' Up", I'll feel like I'm getting somewhere.

Wish me luck, folks--on both counts! With a day full of music, it feels like a good day for it!

It is raining like a crazy raining thing in the Puget Sound area tonight. This is kind of appropriate weather, as I got another rejection on Lament of the Dove today--so this leaves me with one active query still in the air. And that means in turn that I need to get a couple more queries out this weekend. At minimum, I need to hit the next two agents on my list of agents I'm interested in; if I get really ambitious, I'll fling out a couple of paper queries as well. (But I'm not sure I'm going to get that ambitious.)

On a related note, though, I am told by mizkit that the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Colorado Gold contest is absolutely worth the time and money, so I will be preparing Lament to head in that direction over this weekend as well. I figure at minimum, I'm willing to put down the entry fee if it'll get me an interesting critique. More than that would, of course, be cake.

On the good side, though, I had lunch with casirafics today, and we writer-geeked, and fandom-geeked, and expressed our mutual pleasure over the resumption of Battlestar Galactica tonight and Doctor Who tomorrow. Tasty truffles were purchased from the Dilettante Cafe after. Mine were eaten on the way back to work. Yum. ;)

Meanwhile, I will be making a pilgrimage to Dusty Strings tomorrow to finally get a replacement D string for my bouzouki, and hopefully also, replacement tuning pegs for the guitar. And solarbird and I want to practice some on the Meg Davis song "Elf Glade" we've been playing in Jam, which should be fun.

And there will be BSG, and the Doctor, and spazzkat has The Mist in on the Netflix queue, and that should be fun to watch tomorrow night. There are also rumors of a musical outing on Sunday afternoon; more on this on Sunday.

Tonight, though, I'll be enjoying my reunion with my and Dara's TV girlfriend, Starbuck!

Miles since (holy crap, has it really been this long since I did an exercise update?) January 13th: 171.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2756.2
Miles out of the Morannon: 39.2
Miles to Minas Tirith: 80.8

Specifically for blue_succubus and mdhenry, in case either of you happen to see this, but any of the rest of you (either already published or who may have submitted to this particular publisher), feel free to enlighten me on this as well:

What's the status on Kensington Books? blue_succubus's and mdhenry's books seem to fall squarely into the urban fantasy basket, yet, their submission guidelines say they don't do science fiction and fantasy...? Is their web site out of date or is there information I am missing (such as, Kensington will look at urban fantasy if you're coming in via an agent)?

Asking, of course, with an eye towards whether I can send them Faerie Blood.

First up: someone does a LOLCutter on elfquest, and lo, it is the Win.

Second: the 2008 Hugo nominations are out! I haven't actually read any of the contenders for Best Novel this year, though I am eying the Scalzi and the Stross, to be sure. And I must also admit that I looked at the blurb on Rollback in the store, and the concept sounded interesting. I may well indeed have to check out the reviews going around on these books.

However, I'd like to call your all's attention to the delightful list of contenders for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form:

Battlestar Galactica "Razor" Written by Michael Taylor Directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá and Wayne Rose (Sci Fi Channel) (televised version, not DVD)

Doctor Who "Blink" Written by Stephen Moffat Directed by Hettie Macdonald (BBC)

Doctor Who "Human Nature" / "Family of Blood" Written by Paul Cornell Directed by Charles Palmer (BBC)

Star Trek New Voyages "World Enough and Time" Written by Michael Reaves & Marc Scott Zicree Directed by Marc Scott Zicree (Cawley Entertainment Co. and The Magic Time Co.)

Torchwood "Captain Jack Harkness" Written by Catherine Tregenna Directed by Ashley Way (BBC Wales)

I am particularly delighted by the Doctor Who squareoff, and am hopeful that paulcornell2 will score the win despite the excellent competition from Mr. Moffat--just because a) Mr. Cornell is awesome, and b) as I gushed before, David Tennant's performance in that two-parter was incredible.

However, I am genuinely unsure whether either of these will pull ahead of the competition!

And last but not least, Juno says no on Faerie Blood, but this was another favorable rejection, purely a "not to my taste" thing. I can deal with that. Now I'll just have to figure out where else I have left to send this one while I'm querying Lament of the Dove; DAW's most likely. We'll see.

Editing on Queen of Souls is going to commence as of March 1. If any of y'all have anything to say about the book that hasn't been said to me already, please to be getting it to me! (I'll still take comments after that date, mind you, you just run the risk of my already addressing any points you might raise, or else having them get punted to the third draft.)

Kudos to leian and Heidi Who Has No LJ and technoshaman for early remarks!

I think I had what arguably could be my first "trying to be a professional writer" dream this morning. Apparently, Dream Me was trying to sell a manuscript to Teresa Nielsen Hayden--but it was a manuscript that seemed to be a retelling of a John Scalzi novel, only from Persephone's point of view. But Dream Me was waffling about the whole concept, too, and as I awoke, I found myself thinking about backing off selling the manuscript and just calling it the longest piece of Scalzi fanfic ever.

I am amused that my subconscious decided to latch onto Scalzi as the "other writer" in this scenario, given that whatever story Dream Me was working with was not Old Man's War, the only thing I've read by him to date. Neither was the retold version Queen of Souls, either, my Persephone story.

I should, I guess, be taking this as a sign to raise the priority on reading the two other Scalzi novels I've just bought--The Ghost Brigades and The Android's Dream--though he's going to have to wait until I'm done with Cory Doctorow. ;) (General note: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town? Excellent. More on this to come.)

And, clearly, I'm twitching to get started on editing Queen of Souls, too!

I just fired off this year's first ETA: second (how could I have forgotten sending out Faerie Blood to Juno Books last month? I blame the radiation treatments) email query to one Colleen Lindsay of FinePrint Literary Management. She's a brand-spankin' new agent, but from what I've seen reading around about her she's been in the business for a while in other capacities. She is also spoken highly of by John Scalzi, and in the duration of my lurkerdom on his blog to date, Mr. Scalzi has seemed on top of things and highly entertaining to boot.

Plus, Ms. Lindsay links to Dykes to Watch Out For, which is instant points. <3

Let's see if she likes Lament of the Dove.

Folks, this is another reminder to those of you who offered to beta read Queen of Souls: if you have something to say about the Prologue, Chapter 1, or Chapter 2, please to be getting it to me before the 29th. The plan is still to start editing this thing in March; until then, I'll be working on hopefully the last round of edits on Lament of the Dove so that I can get that puppy back out the door and forget about it for a while.

(Please also note: you can still get me commentary even after I start editing. You just run the risk of any of your feedback getting superseded by edits I'll be making, and/or getting postponed until the third draft.)

Thanks in advance, again! And to those of you who have already checked in about the reading, leian and technoshaman, thanks extra! You guys rock.

leian checked in with me a little while ago to say that she was halfway done reading Queen of Souls. This reminded me that I wanted to put out a new update about that. So, for all of you who had previously expressed interest in beta reading that book, please note:

I am extending the deadline on this. This is due to me having been quite flattened by the radiation treatments, enough that a lot of my not-at-work time is going towards sleeping. Since I have one more week of treatments to go, I'm dubious I'm going to be up for editing by Friday. ;)

I have been told that even after the treatments are over, it'll take a few weeks before I'm really normal again--which goes well into February. Also, there's a monster project just now gearing up at work and the schedule on that also goes well into February. I expect that every last one of my brain cells, as they come back online, are going to get glommed by this. Weekend work is not out of the question. Ergo, I'm expecting that I won't have much energy for editing at least until the end of February.

Therefore, the new beta reading deadline for Queen of Souls is Friday, February 29th.

Thanks in advance again to any of you who can help!

I suppose this lets me off the hook now for sending them that postcard asking them what's up with my submission, huh? *^_^*;; (Yeah yeah yeah I know I should have sent it before now, but well hey, y'know, cancer.)

Anyway, I got an email back from them tonight and they say no. However, it's another fairly positive rejection letter. Here's the money quote:

"This is a nice straight forward urban fantasy. We flat don't have room in the schedule for anything not extraordinary, and this doesn't quite reach that point. Shop it around to other publishers, though. Someone will want it."

Now I need to think about what to do about this, and to whom to query it next.

Elapsed turnaround time from submission to rejection: one year, three months, 25 days!

ETA 8:52pm: And, undaunted, our heroine fires off the novel to Juno, who sound like they may be a good fit for it as they are looking for "fantasy with a focus on the female". Fingers crossed.

Today I have read a novel (and posted a review of same), been reasonably functional at work, handled going to Zappy, and most importantly, I have written something.

Not much--barely 100 or so words on Child of Ocean, Child of Stars. But the long dry spell I've been suffering as of late has been extremely irritating. I know intellectually that it's okay if I haven't been able to write thanks to the radiation treatments draining my brain. This doesn't mean I like it. And if I am not able to write, I stress. Vicious circle, you know the drill, etc.

But tonight I wrote words. It makes me feel all accomplished and Jack-Aubrey-esque!

I still haven't managed to post the last Jam Report, but hey, I'll get there. Though as long as I'm feeling all catchy-uppy, here, I'm almost to Minas Tirith! (Gods, have I really not posted a mileage update in over a month?)

Miles since November 26th: 85.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2570.4
Miles out of Isengard: 777.4
Miles to Minas Tirith: 8.6

Folks, those of you who have offered to beta-read Queen of Souls for me, please to note that I do plan to start editing it once my radiation treatment is over. So this means I estimate starting it the last week of this month; let's call the date 1/25.

So if y'all have feedback you want to get me, please be sure and get it to me by then. If you're hard-pressed for time, focus first on the Prologue and then Chapters 1 and 2, since those are the things that'll be in any partials I start sending out.

Thanks again for any help you can provide. It is most appreciated!

Those of you reading my annathewriter journal have already seen this, but for those of you who aren't, I am delighted to announce that as of tonight I have FINISHED Queen of Souls!

Not unlike Faerie Blood, this is a book I owe to mizkit--because the idea for it arose in my brain when I was brainstorming with her about a Luna thing she was participating in at the time. She came up with a different idea she wanted to use instead, so I called dibs on this one. And it grew into the tale of Korinne/Persephone and Aidon/Hades, a sequel, if you will, to the original myth.

And, with this post, I am officially throwing the book open for beta reading. I am particularly interested in beta readers with high Greek mythology fu. I consider mine fairly decent, and what I didn't remember I double-checked on the redoubtable theoi.com--but please, if anybody out there wants to double-check my double-checking, I want to hear from you! I have made some deliberate changes from the original myths, but aside from things I'm specifically doing to serve the greater purpose of my story, I am trying to hold as much as I can to the canon of the mythos. If one can say that Greek mythology has a "canon". ;)

Anybody interested in beta reading who isn't already reading annathewriter and/or who isn't already on my readers mailing list, talk to me and I'll get you set up. Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer help!

So I neglected to mention last weekend that spazzkat, solarbird, and I went to go see Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Not as solid a movie as the original Elizabeth, I think. Yet Cate Blanchett was certainly queenly, and oh my yes the Errol-Flynnesque Handsome-and-Dashingness of that Walter Raleigh fellow was a potent force indeed (the Queen had a great eye for his, aheh, "immensities"). Anybody besides Dara and me grin at the "Bess tending her lady in the bath" scene? I mean, damn. Let's just say, after seeing that scene as well as the Queen pitching a massive hissyfit later, it was pretty evident that her royal jealousy was a lot less concerned with Walter. ;)

I also neglected to mention that after Jam this past Sunday, technoshaman and cflute left a coat and the chocolate sauce that had gone on the pumpkin pie behind. So I took them over to their place, which was the first time I'd seen it, and which let me see a few of the winding back streets behind the Murk. In return, they gave me two more Echo's Children CDs as well as the Echo's Children songbook. Yay!

As one might expect my reading rhythm has been mightily thrown off this week, but I hope to maybe finish up reading rachelcaine's Midnight Alley. And it is worth a mention that I have finally purchased a copy of Emma Bull's War for the Oaks, as I did not actually have a copy in my library, which seemed a rather criminal lack. You don't get much more Classic Urban Fantasy than that book.

The kittens are steadily growing. In the last week in particular they've both suddenly become mightily aware of the virtues of being petted, which for me has meant that if I'm lying on the couch with my laptop, trying to write, one or the both of them will climb up onto my chest and purr like mad. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, this has been documented for posterity by Dara!

I have but a single episode left in Season 3, Volume 2 of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which has some prime silly in it as well as several episodes I remember vividly from when I watched this thing as a kid. No less than six, count 'em, six episodes where Captain Crane gets his head taken over by the Monster of the Week, too. I begin to wonder why the hell he still has security clearance, by this stage of the show. ;) I have not yet acquired any spectacularly crappy movies to watch during my recovery time, but I do not lack for stuff to watch; I've still got the Dresden DVDs as well as the rest of Season 3 of Remington Steele, and the discs from ravyngyngvar as well.

I continue to add to the Buy Anna a Black MacBook Fund, a.k.a. my savings account. I hope to have enough bucks by the end of the year to get that computer--specifically the black one, since Dara and Paul both have white Mac laptops and I want to be able to tell mine apart. I'm pretty sure that once I get said machine, I will be calling it Winnowill--even if by rights any computer named Winnowill ought to be a Windows box. But Winnowill sounds cooler as a computer name than either Venka or Teir, and I've got too many past associations with Rayek to use that as a computer name. ^_^

To those of you who are so inclined, a belated Happy Samhain! I hope your celebrations went well. And belated Happy Halloween as well. We had a fairly quiet one here at MurkNorth; only about ten trick-or-treaters showed up, total. But we did get some interested reactions to the Japanese candy that Dara was handing out--these tasty little chocolate-covered biscuits shaped like mushrooms and acorns. They come in small packages, and you can buy a big bag of said packages at Uwajimaya. Since we had so few trick-or-treaters, we have quite a bit of this candy left. Oh darn, whatever shall we do with it?

And good luck to everybody out there tackling Nanowrimo this year! I will not be doing it officially, though as with last year, I hope to achieve the personal goal of 25,000 words written. Some of these will have to go into the tail end of Queen of Souls, but hopefully the rest of them will go into one of the skiffy novels I'm working on, Child of Ocean, Child of Stars. I'll be posting periodic updates on that to my writing journal as well as to nanonov.

I am now in the Epilogue of Queen of Souls, which means the end is in sight and I should be putting out a call for beta readers on that thing real soon now. I am dubious that I will be able to finish it up this weekend, but we'll see how many braincells the Vicodin leaves me. I still need to send that inquiry postcard to Baen as well, and also review the state I left Lament in and see if there's further tightening up I need to do on its final chapters before I send some queries back out on it.

I have no brain to speak of this morning, thanks to the Vicodin, but have nevertheless been able to putter around and get some things done. I'm very thirsty, thanks to the anesthetic gas they had me breathing during the procedure; they'd warned me it'd leave me with a bit of a sore throat. But all in all, I'm feeling pretty good. And George has now jumped up on me twice demanding pets. Aww. Perhaps a good chunk of this afternoon will be devoted to petting the cats. ^_^

Miles since the 25th: 8.7
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2442.6
Miles out of Isengard: 649.6
Miles to Minas Tirith: 136.4

Went and had another appointment with my endoc today and told him a number of things. One, about the BFFN. Two, that I thought that having me on the T3 as well as the T4 was a good idea. Three, I'd felt fabulous initially after going on the T3 and while in Japan, but that when we got back and the weather got colder, I started feeling more sluggish. Four, that as a result of the BFFN I was a lot stressier than usual. Five, that I'd ditched my birth control after my cancer diagnosis.

All of which amounted to his rearranging my prescriptions again. I've been bumped down to 125mcg of T4 and bumped up to 10mcg of T3. And, he wrote me the T4 prescription for the generic version this time rather than Synthroid, which I haven't ever had before. Ten bucks cheaper doesn't suck, though I don't know if there'll be any actual physiological difference taking generic T4. We'll see what happens when I start the new dosages tomorrow. If my head explodes, y'all will know what happened.

Meanwhile, I have acquired the second half of season 3 of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, thanks to a fortuitously timed 15-percent-off Barnes and Noble coupon arriving in the mail. Muahaha. I am well armed now for recovery days next week. And when I run out of Voyage, I've got the Dresden DVDs gamera_spinning so kindly sent me, as well as some Norwegian ones from ravyngyngvar.

Tomorrow we're probably going to go see the new Queen Elizabeth movie, and on Sunday, there will be Jam! sutures1 will be joining us, so we'll have five people instead of four. If anybody wants to see my five and raise me, better sing out so I'll know how much pie we need. ^_^

And last but not least, I am within 3-4K of finishing Queen of Souls. I may even get it done before Surgery Day. Go me! That'll leave November for a half-Nano attempt on my part, and ideally also following up with Baen on the status of Faerie Blood and getting Lament of the Dove back out the door where it belongs.

Miles since the 22nd: 10.9
Miles out of Hobbiton: 2433.9
Miles out of Isengard: 640.9
Miles to Minas Tirith: 145.1