Tempest

I'm making reasonably steady progress on Tempest, though not as rapid as I'd have liked. Still, it seems that it's better to think a bit here and there than to rewrite/rewrite/rewrite. Of course I'll probably still have to! It might be that this story just didn't have as long to percolate, so there wasn't a huge build-up of words just waiting for the starting gate to open (think the rush of the first hour of Nano!). It might be that my muse is a bit reluctant, being as this is definitely a bit darker story than anything I've written previously. Or it might be that this is just the perfect pace for this story!

I'm doing in the neighborhood of a chapter a week, and they're averaging over 4K each. So if I can just keep the wheels turning, it will get itself done in a few months. That's fine.

I'd been thinking that I'd go on another round of revisions of some of my older stuff once I got rolling with this story, but it's not happening yet. I'm teaching another workshop at Forward Motion in August, and I've recently signed up for a six-month writing course put on by author Holly Lisle, How to Think Sideways. Even after only one week, I'm beginning to see that this investment is quite likely to pay off in a practical sense.

So it'll be at least September before I start revising again, and it's a toss-up still whether it will be Joy Comes in the Morning or Off Beat. Off Beat (aka Squid) has finaled in the Genesis contest, but I won't have the results of that until mid September. I'd hoped to enter Joy in the 08 contest as well, but didn't have time to revise the opening pages to my satisfaction, so I'd like to enter it in '09. A whole new category for me: romance!

And if I'm going to get chapter five written this week, I'd better get rolling!

Yep. I'm THIS busy!

It's been a crazy week, and I'm suspecting the whole month may look this way.

At the moment the first week of the Effective Viewpoint Workshop is finishing up at Forward Motion. We've got 18 participants getting into hands-on exploration of the tools of point-of-view. So sure, we may still wind up using multiple third person past for most of our writing, but at least we will know how to make it a conscious decision instead of having only a default!

Next month Mar and I are running a workshop on query packages, including the dread synopsis. You have to be a member at FM to join in, but there's no cost.

Aside from the workshop (Monday and Tuesday there was nothing *aside* from the workshop; I practically breathed the darn thing!), I've been working on my opening scenes for the Genesis contest, both The Girl Who Cried Squid and the romance, Joy Comes in the Morning. I've got a working copy of both now and some critiques happening. The contest consists of the first fifteen pages, so that's a reasonable amount of pages to prep up.

Sadly, that's left Teagren and Quest to be Queen sitting on the sidelines. But on my walk this morning I thought through a major issue that I'd seen lurking in the background of the story and discovered a solution I think will work. Once I got to work I popped my insights into a document so that I won't forget. It could easily be a couple weeks yet before I get enough focus to deal with it in the novel itself.

Part of the problem is that the story originally came from a group of random exercises looped together. When I decided there was enough plot linking them to create a novel, I kept a few too many of the old parts. Worked great in the linked exercises, but didn't quite pull through at novel length. If I get rid of one major holdover, it frees up the ending to being something more logical. The previous version came a little forced. So now I'm looking forward to getting back to it. The cool thing is that even though I've finished revising most of the novel, it will only take a few lines tucked in here and there to twist towards the new ending.

But first I have to get my contest entries finalized and out, and keep the workshops humming. First things first!