Personal Schmersonal

A Very Interesting Weekend

I have resurrected, bleary and blinking, from a weekend that was extremely… interesting. It got so strange I pulled out the cards during daylight, and that hasn’t happened in a while.

Anyway, I’m home again, and back in the saddle. There’s HOOD‘s Season Two to finish prepping for publication today, which means a blurb and finding a specific code. Last night I got the ISBNs sorted, so that’s good. It’s looking like the release will be mid-April, and now I can turn my attention to other things–once, of course, I get the listing, the blurb, and the rest sorted today.

Today also sees a new post over at Haggard Feathers! This one’s all about formatting, and only for paid subscribers. it should drop about 11am PST, so I’ll be warbling about it from the rooftops once it does.

There’s also the Free Agent February giveaway, still ongoing. I can’t wait to draw the winners near the end of the month and send these bad boys out.

I’m told we’re very near sorting out Finder’s Watcher, and there’s a revision pass on Damage I should get under my belt before moving on to finishing Sons of Ymre‘s zero, working on HOOD’s Season Three, and doing the preliminary work on The Bloody Throne. I’m pretty sure I’ll never get done with everything I need to this year, but then again, that’s usually the feeling in February. The shortest month of the year, but also the one where the needle drops into the groove and starts bringing the music up.

…some time passed since that last paragraph, since I flicked to the Sons of Ymre window open on my desktop and fell into the story again. It’s probably procrastination; gods know I don’t want to squeeze out 40k to finish the zero this week. I have other things to do, the Muse just isn’t listening.

She often ignores me.

Anyway, I’ll be fighting both that siren call and my own stomach’s rolling today. It was a very, very strange holiday weekend, and one I’m glad is over.

I was going to close with a wish that we could all kick Tuesday right in the pants, but I’m sensing the day is just as tired as we are. So instead, I’ll wish for all of us to have some rest. I think we’ve earned it, after the past few days. I wonder if Mercury is retrograde or something.

Be gentle with yourselves today, dear ones. We’re hurtling at almost unimaginable speed through inimical space studded with meteors and other strange things, whirling on a speck of rock around a massive nuclear reactor.

We need all the help–and all the kindness–we can get.

Spores, Math, Pixies

If you look closely, you can see the fairy ring. Of course I know it’s spores and math… and yet, I can’t help but see pixies dancing, too.

It was the strangest thing; our yard didn’t have visible mushrooms–and certainly never had rings of them–until after I finished writing Gallow & Ragged. Then, as soon as we got some good rain, mycelium circles were fricking everywhere, and the urge to leave a dish of milk out during the nail-paring of a new moon was well-nigh irresistible.

Sometimes I wonder about this career of mine. Whether it’s magic or just plain selective attention is academic, though. The real point is, I’m not going to stop writing–not while I’m breathing. Maybe that commitment catches the gaze of a few things better left alone.

Still… the Folk like the mad, and they love bards. I can’t really sing anymore, but I’ve an endless well of stories to tell. Good enough.

Have a lovely weekend, my dears. And remember, should you hear the click of high heels behind you on a dark road, and the scratch of very large golden hound’s nails…

…don’t look back. Just keep moving. Or if you must look back, remember to be kind, and to ask no questions you don’t truly want answers to.

Disenchanted, and a Viral Giveaway

Well, it’s Thursday. I woke up disenchanted and suspect it’ll only get worse, though I did figure out that Sons of Ymre wants to be two books instead of one, and the gobs of wordcount I’ve been producing are because my brain is trying to finish a zero of book one before it will let me move to book two.

I wish the Muse would have let me know before now, purely for scheduling reasons, but her ways are not our ways, and heaven help those who expect them to be.

Today, once I get the dogs walked, is all about proofing. I don’t care what the Muse wants, this book has got to get proofed, and I’ll thank her to let me get it done so we can eat in the near future. I can’t work starved, and she should know that by now.

The spirit might be super willing, but the body has its own needs.

Anyway, it’s Subscription Thursday and everything is prepped and ready for that to drop. And I have news for you all–a brand-new giveaway for February!

Viral Agents

That’s right! Two lucky winners will receive signed, personalized copies of my Viral Agents books–Agent Zero and Agent Gemini, sent media mail anywhere in the world.

I love these books, and I’m excited to be sending them as prizes. You can enter daily, and there are all sorts of fun things you can do to get extra entries. The giveaway ends on February 27, 2020.

So if you’re interested, just click here or on the book cover to the right, and enter to your heart’s content.

I have coffee to finish and the dogs to walk, then it’s settling on the couch with tablet and pen, tricking my brain into thinking I’m proofreading on paper. For some reason I don’t “see” the errors the same way if I’m looking at a vertical screen; I need the horizontal and a pencil-shaped object clutched in my dominant hand. So much of this writing gig is figuring out how to game your own brain and responses to get the effect you need.

Of course, that’s life as well as writing, so I’d better get to it. The world–and the Muse–doesn’t wait for our pleasure, more’s the pity.

Over and out!

Altered Deal

A cold morning. Not enough coffee. Dogs quiet after they rooted me out of bed with cold noses and the absolute unquenchable commitment to wriggling under the covers with me.

It’s not that I minded, there just wasn’t any room, so I had to get up and make some caffeine.

Today is for proofing HOOD‘s Season Two and wordcount on a couple other projects. I know I swore I’d just work on one thing at a time, and I am. I’ve just altered the meaning of “at a time” slightly; otherwise, I’d never get anything done.1

Mostly, it’s a crisis of confidence. My career is changing, and that means discomfort. I keep thinking nothing will ever get better, I’ll be struggling and scratching all my life, and it’s tiring. Why I expect it to be any different is beyond me; at the same time, there’s only so much well, I knew this when I started can do to ameliorate the feeling of what the hell?

There’s a lot of what the hell going on in my life right now.

My coffee is cooling rapidly, the dogs need a walk, I should plant a few things in the garden to get a jump on spring. The early cherry tree down the road keeps giggling every time I pass. Look, she says, you were so worried, but it’s fine. Leave the worry behind.

I wish I could. Would someone else pick it up if I did? Maybe the worry could carry itself, but if it could, what the hell is it doing on my back?

…yeah, I’m in a Mood. The cure is work, as usual; if I view the pain as labor pangs I can bite down and wonder what might be birthing. It could be that I’m having one of those strange plateaus before the work takes a leap forward, which would be welcome indeed.

Of course, some of this could be the fact that Sons of Ymre is 47k long and just embarking on its last half. There’s so much to be done, and I wonder if the story is top-heavy or just plain stupid. The crisis of confidence on a single story is metastasizing, spreading through everything else I need to get done on a daily basis.

So this is the part where I get stubborn. It might be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad story, but at least it will not be a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, unfinished story. Small mercy, but one I’ll take. Ambition and the desire for security has never really moved me, but spiteful stubbornness? That’s the whipcrack I respond to, indeed.

I suppose if I get mad or spiteful I’d be able to buckle down more easily. But I’m so tired lately. Maybe I should blame time off; getting back to work seems an insurmountable chore once I halt. Objects in motion tending to stay in motion, and all that.

I’m even irritating myself with this. Time to gulp the last bit of caffeine, buckle the dogs into their harnesses, and get out the door. A brisk walk in the cold will hopefully give me better things to worry about.

I tell everyone else to just keep writing and trust the work. It’s that magical moment where I have to take my own damn advice or stop handing it out. It’s damn hard to trust the work when one doesn’t even trust oneself, but paradoxically easier than thinking one’s self might be trustworthy at all.

And now that I’ve confused myself mightily, I swear I’m getting out the door. Tuesday has managed to gain the initiative roll, but my armor class is high, I’ve shifted my charisma to dexterity, and I have a few daggers lying about.

The campaign ain’t over yet.

Soundtrack Monday: Perry, in Love

Yesterday, the iTunes algorithm kept trying to force Pink Martini’s Amado Mio on me until I broke down and listened to it. Now, I love Pink Martini with the flame of a thousand suns… but so did Perry from the Kismet series.

The first bars of Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love send a chill up my spine, because I could reliably play it and Perry would lift his head in the Monde, smiling his bland, appreciative smile. It’s what’s playing inside his hellbreed head when he’s strapped into the metal frame and Jill’s at work with the knives.

I suppose it doesn’t help that in my head Perry looks a lot like a young Max Raabe, especially in the short story where he meets Jack Karma. Raabe in a tuxedo with his hair slicked back is exactly what Perry looks like when he’s wanting to impress, look harmless to, or seduce someone. Of course I know Mr Raabe is a nice fellow and Perry only chose that particular form to send a shiver through me…

…but it worked. It worked really well.

Enjoy the music, my friends. I know Hyperion-Pericles-Perry does.

Flamethrower and Swan

I’m in a Mood today. It might be leftover from last week, which was full of non-optimal stuff; it might be the weather, it might just be generalized anxiety. I’ll decide after coffee and a run.

At least I got all my Sunday housecleaning chores sorted, and I have a list of things to get done today. The attack of the don’t-wannas is deep and toothy, but if I nibble around the edges I might get to evening without feeling like a giant useless lump of pudding. Which is devoutly to be desired.

The Little Prince is reading The Great Gatsby in English class, which means I should probably take a spin through it once I finish the Francis Young I’m working through. So far the Young is really great, except for an assertion that accusations of witchcraft leveled at the marginalized means said accusations are “depoliticized.” Which is a bunch of bullshit, but then again, I don’t think the author is a witch and definitely doesn’t identify as female.

I told the Prince that everyone in Gatsby is awful, and so far he agrees. I don’t think there’s a single reasonable person in the entire novel. The Prince thinks Fitzgerald would really have liked to be Gatsby but sensed on some level how that would go terribly wrong, so he invented the narrator to keep some distance. Not a bad analysis at all; I’m so proud of my young reader I could just about burst.

So there are good things–chief among them the coffee soaking into my tissues and making me much, much less murder-y. I’m not quite sucking on the chewy stuff at the bottom, but it’s close. I should get the dogs out for walkies; Boxnoggin needs a short run to get his fidgets worked out.

Who am I kidding? I need a short run to get my fidgets out, too. Today will be full of proofing, always a fun time, but I have enough else to do that I can switch to other tasks when fatigue hits and go back to the text when I’m renewed. Once the proofing’s done there’ll be incorporating changes in the text, then I can upload, schedule, and call it dusted.

None of that will happen if I don’t bid you a civil adieu, though, my friends, so off I go. Bad mornings can turn into bad days, but this one I think I have a chance to fight off.

It is a Monday, after all. Grab the flamethrowers, get on the swan, and let’s go.

Old, Protective Friend

An old, old friend–the last time I regularly wore this particular ring, I was writing Jill. It was part of a set of armor–moonstone, bloodstone, amber, silver–I wore daily for years.

I still have all those rings, but I’ve shifted to mostly plain silver now–just as much armor, and won’t leave distinguishing marks if I have to punch someone. I mean, I never want to punch anyone… but if I have to, I won’t break my fingers because I need those bitches for typing, and I won’t leave an easily traced pattern in the contusions.

Anyway, I put this old friend on a spare hand-slot yesterday, needing a bit more in the way of defense. (It’s been a super rough week.) And I remembered just how good it felt to be protected.

I even nibbled on the stone a bit, as I was wont to do when in deep thought writing combat scenes many years ago. Time is a wheel, indeed.

Have a good weekend, chickadees. Whatever you need to protect yourself is valid and necessary, and I wish you peace and soothing.