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.

Doctor Sleep, Meet Siouxsie

I’ve completed a website redesign! How do you guys like the new look? Also, there’s a new giveaway; I should just do a dedicated giveaways page, shouldn’t I.


I spent a restless night, falling into the deep well of sleep late. Maybe it was watching Doctor Sleep that did it–I bounced off the book pretty hard, but the movie has some good visuals and I always like Ewan MacGregor. The biggest draws in the movie are Rebecca Ferguson’s Rose the Hat and Cliff Curtis’s Billy, both of whom are much better than the movie deserves. Especially Ferguson; without her the entire edifice collapses.

I could also have been too warm; after a couple nights hovering near freezing and days of raw high-30s (Fahrenheit, of course, America is Still Imperial) it’s a relatively balmy 50F and the dogs are eager for their morning walk.

And the dogs. Boxnoggin isn’t too bad, he picks a single spot and stays there, moving only glacially all night–always towards the back of my knees, the dog has a magnet for them, apparently. But Miss B is an elderly statesdog, and the bed gets too warm and too soft, so she hops down and pads for the tile floor of the loo regularly, then comes back and settles next to me when she’s chilled enough. I don’t mind, but every time she hops down I wake up, thinking she might need to visit the yard.

So I have coffee, and Siouxsie and the Banshees playing. It feels like my early twenties all over again–the good parts, when I could find CDs I liked at work instead of just playing radio roulette. When I began to realize I could live in places where my books wouldn’t be shredded, my journals stolen, my body battered.

I had terrible experiences after I left home, sure. But none of them were bad enough to drive me back, and none were as bad as home even on the worst days. So all in all, that was when I began to live.

Maybe it was the child endangerment in Doctor Sleep that disturbed me. It’s one of the few things I have trouble watching in any movie; I’ll fast-forward through scenes of mounting dread even if I know the child is fine. King’s IT is one of my formative books, despite being nothing but child endangerment, but somehow it’s easier for me to process while reading. Seeing it on a hyper-detailed screen instead of on the screen inside my head, where I can fuzz details and move characters to my heart’s content, might be the problem.

Anyway, today is for me to be gentle with myself and get some more work done. I want the first scene in HOODs Season Three done and dusted today, since so much in the later stream of the book depends on where I start the cataract. And I need a car accident in Sons of Ymre, not to mention more whispering insanity.

The good thing about the sudden warmth is that I’ll be able to get a few things done in the garden when I break from the scenery in my head. It would be nice to get the large beds down the hill weeded and some seeds scattered, since we’re past the danger of freezing. Or so my nose says, and Miss B agrees.

Her nose is much better, after all.

It’s also subscription day, which means around 2pm free fiction will be flying to inboxes–always pleasant. I wish you a happy and productive Thursday, friends. We’ve almost, almost made it through the week.

Still, “weeks” are largely a concept beyond the dogs. They are concerned with the daily, like the walk they want now and are prancing with impatience to get to. I suppose I’d best get started, then.

Over and out.

Perspective and Rescue

Good morning! I woke up with Hall & Oates singing about your kiss is on my list, and whichever one of you gave me that earworm, I will have my revenge.

Ahem.

Yesterday was super productive, mostly because I got a run in. I just work better when I can pound the pavement, for however short a period. Yesterday was also nerve-wracking–Haggard Feathers goes paid-subscription this month, so I was doing the last bit of prep for that. One free post per month, the rest will be paid-subscriber-only, and I’ll be doing an open thread every Thursday for paid subscribers to ask me about writing and publishing.

I figure I’ll try it for a year and see how it works out. I like Substack‘s terms way better than Medium’s, and the fact that the former makes a point of not “owning” my data/content and the latter makes a point in the opposite direction has a lot to do with my willingness to experiment.

I also spent some time procrastinating (after the productivity, of course) with Canva templates. Graphic design is so not my strong point, but I like playing.

Isn’t that nice? It’s something I say a lot–sooner or later, the muscle inside your head that sees good writing material gets hypertrophied (and there’s a great deal of hyperplasia, too, but that’s beside the point) and everything becomes material. Which is great when something hurts like hell–thinking this will be great material helps provide perspective and gives the pain meaning, which is a step in ameliorating it. It’s not so great when one is relentlessly questioning one’s own happiness, but I consider it a small price to pay.

Of course other people’s mileage may vary, but the warning still stands. Sooner or later, all things serve the work.

Anyway, I’ve more Sons of Ymre to get done today–one character is about to rescue another from a burning car–and I’ve got to get some characters in HOOD rescued in their little escape pod. Rescue seems to be the theme of the day, which might bode ill for the dogs’ walk. If all else fails they can drag me home, though.

Let’s hope it’s not necessary; I’ve got so much to do today.

I’d best get started then, hadn’t I.