Editing BLOOD ROCK in response to the notes from Bell Bridge Books is progressing. It's been quite the challenge, but I've preserved the bulk of the book and got it to under 500 pages. I'm going to try to get this editing pass (#2) done today, a third editing pass done next week, and send it to the editors the following week.
-the Centaur
UPDATE: BLOOD ROCK is now 488 pages (as my personal reading copies are formatted, which is probably about 400-450 pages of a normal novel), meaning I've successfully cut 100 pages from the novel. And, as I hoped, I JUST FINISHED THE SECOND REVISION. On to pass 3.
In the past I've tried various complicated New Year's Resolutions. I'm going to try something simpler this year: I'm not taking on any "resolutions," except for one I'm going to come back to later.
Instead, I'm going to review my past Resolutions and my Life Plan, update them, and come up with a set of goals that I'll try to achieve. No ridiculous list of resolutions filling up my life in January, then forgotten by February. No public declarations of things I can fail at. In short, no pressure. Just a private set of goals, which are subject to tradeoffs based on my best judgment.
The one "resolution" I'm going to take on: in January, come up with a list of eleven Hanging Tasks, and tackle them, one per month, in 2011. I define a "Hanging Task" as: something I've wanted to do for a long time, that I need to do or would be good for me, that I've made significant progress on, yet not completed for a long period of time---but, when completed, would be over and done with and off my radar. So things like exercise, karate or learning new programming languages don't count because they have no fixed end point, but reorganizing my library definitely does.
One concrete example of a Hanging Task is an essay on futurism which I was going to call "Ten for '10", but missed that deadline through a combination of procrastination and a genuine last-minute disaster that ate up the allotted time I'd set aside to finish the essay. As another example, there's a nasty financial issue I need to deal with ... in theory I could literally put it off until I retire, but it will make my life much easier in the meantime if I resolve it now. The problem? It involves a whole bunch of grungy paperwork which I've been "putting off."
Putting off? Not really. There are a lot of things I'm good at getting done; there are others that I'm not. If I'm at work, I'll almost always choose working on work over taking out an hour to do errands, even though some errands, like the grungy paperwork above, need to be worked on during business hours while talking with someone on the phone. If I'm not at work, I'll almost always choose writing over blogging. It's not that I don't want or need to do those things; it's just that I'm not good making space for them in my life.
So, for 2011: I will pick 11 of these (I've already got four off the top of my ghead). Set aside time for them, a few days each month, until each one is dealt with. The result: I'll have 11 less things to worry about ... and that much more mental space for something more productive.
Cheers to the New Year! I hope you enjoy yours.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the tag to purchase an Office Depot 5-shelf cherry bookcase, purchased late last year as part of my library reorganization project. I have approximately 12 of these 5-shelves from Office Depot, 13 2-shelf ones, 1 three-shelf one, 6 more 5 shelfs from Ikea, at least 4 more miscellaneous 5-shelf bookcases, and two wall-sized units, one from Ikea and one built by myself.
I had this thought after reading a long critical blogpost on a recent scifi novel:
The longer, more detailed, and, especially, the more clever you make your negative criticism of something, the more I suspect that you're doing a hatchet job on a work that's actually good, but simply something you don't personally like ... and that you've lost the ability to tell the difference.
-the Centaur
Now that we're on WordPress, let's give this a try again and see whether Qumana plays better with WordPress than it did with Blogger.
ANSWER: Worked just fine. Borders was closing up shop so I had to go back into WordPress later to add the post tags, but I assume that's somewhere in the Qumana interface I didn't have time to find. Image posting was relatively easy - actually slightly easier than the WordPress interface itself, though that's more a web app issue than a UX design issue.
-the Centaur
Pictured: my mobile office on the balcony of Borders at Santana Row. Software: Android, Camera Sync, Mac OS X, Chrome, Picasaweb, Qumana, WordPress. Hardware: Macbook Air 13 inch, Nexus One. Foodware: the staggeringly unhealthy and delicious Cookies and Cream JavaKula.
Craig Ferguson, Doctor Who ... and a contingent of flying monkeys. It's a good, if bizarre, introduction to Doctor Who ... but I love the quote that Doctor Who is about "Intellect and romance triumph over brute force and cynicism" ... love it.
Of course ... it didn't air; it's only on Youtube:
And the Doctor himself:
Loved Season 5 of the new series, btw.
-the Centaur
Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing. For example, I enjoy eating dinner out. There's nothing wrong with that; but it's always easier to eat out than it is to fix dinner, as I can have high-quality healthy food made for me while I read or write or draw, whereas cooking at home involves shopping, cooking, and cleaning that I'm fortunate enough to be able to pay other people to do (and that through the absurd good luck that the rather esoteric work I was most interested in doing in grad school turned out to be relatively lucrative in real life).
But that's not fair to my wife, or cats, nor does it help me catch up on my pile of DVDs or my library cleaning or any of a thousand other projects that can't be done out at dinner. Sometimes I deliberately go out to dinner because I need to read or write or draw rather than do laundry, but I shouldn't do that all the time - even though I can. But, if I keep making local decisions each time I go out to eat, I'll keep doing the same thing - going out to eat - until the laundry or bills or book piles reach epic proportions.
This may not be a problem for people who are "deciders", but I'm definitely a "get-stuck-in-a-rutter". So how can I overcome this, if I'm living with the inertia of my own decision making system? One way is to find some other reason to come home - for example, cooking dinner with my wife (normally not convenient as she eats early, while I'd normally be at work, and even if I did try to get home her dinner time traffic puts me an hour and a half from home; but we've set a time to do that from time to time) but she's out of town for business in New York, so I don't have her to help me.
So the way I've been experimenting with recently is treating myself. Over the weekend I made a large bowl of tabbouleh, one of my favorite foods, and pound cake, one of my favorite desserts. The next evening I grabbed a small plate of sushi from Whole Foods and made another dent into the tabbouleh. I had a commitment the next night, but the following night I stopped to get gas and found that a Whole Foods had opened near my house, and on the spur of the moment I decided to go in, get a ribeye steak, and cook myself another dinner, eating even more of the tabbouleh.
The tabbouleh itself is healthy, and maybe the sushi is too; the steak, not so much. Normally I wouldn't get another steak as I'd had a few recently, both homecooked and out at restaurants; but I wanted to overcome my decision making inertia. It would have been so easy to note the presence of the Whole Foods for later and go eat out; instead, I said explicitly to myself: you can have a steak if you eat in. And so I walked in to Whole Foods, walked out a couple minutes later with a very nice steak, and went home, quickly cooked a very nice dinner, and got some work done.
Normally I prefer to eat about one steak a month (or less), sticking to mostly fish as my protein source, but I'll let my red meat quota creep up a bit if it helps me establish the habit of cooking more meals at home. Once that habit's more established, I can work on making it healthier again. Already I know ways to do it: switch to buffalo, for example, which I prefer over beef steak anyway (and I'm not just saying that as a health food nut; after you've eaten buffalo long enough to appreciate the flavor you don't want to go back).
So far, tricking myself into doing the right thing has been a success. Now let's see if we can go a step further and just do the right thing on our own.
Victory! 72,037 words, 60,164 of them new. Boo-yah! I leave you with this:
“Fair enough,” Jeremiah said. “Alright. We know where we’re going, and how we’re handling this. And we all know who we’re facing: the Baron Abinger, who handed us all our hats on his last encounter. Be on your guard.”
She looked up at Lord Birmingham. “Sir, I have said what I need to say,” Jeremiah said. “I now place myself in your hands. This ship, and this mission, are yours. At your discretion, Godspeed.”
Lord Birmingham straightened. “Thank you, Commander,” he said. “All you need do is let Lady Georgiana and I guide you through the dark heart of Georgia, and then the rest of this mission is yours.”
“Then take us away, sir.”
Just reached 70,000 total words in THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE ... 58,735 total added during this month, so it looks good to hit 60,000 words tomorrow. Woohoo!
As usual, Nano's raw rough-drafty stuff, but here's where we are in the story (suitably snipped and edited not to give too much away):
The engines of the Machine spun up with a terrific rising whine and discharged all at once, lightning in a bottle, illuminating the entire diving bell interior with a crackling foxfire glow. Even the handcuff that pinned her left hand to a support arch shimmered as the transelectric field rippled through it, but as she was grounded to the same pole it left her with little more than a shudder.
As the Clockwork Time Machine rattled and clacked, ticked and swayed through the tunnels of possibility, Jeremiah hunched in a little ball by the pillar in her bloodied shift, her left hand high over her head, twisting uselessly in the cuff as two footmen stood over her, watching, their six-strings at the ready. It made her feel small and helpless, even though they’d made the mistake of cuffing her bad hand; but she hadn’t the heart to do her usual scheming for escape.
She had to see this through.
[caption id="attachment_810" align="alignright" width="300" caption="At Work on the Clockwork Time Machine at Borders"][/caption]I've "won" National Novel Writing Month for 2010, but I just can't stop writing. I know I have bills to pay, books to edit, projects at work, and a massive cleaning project in my library ... but THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE has me right now and I can't stop.
But ... really ... is that such a bad thing? Since I've "won", I've written 4200 more words, 2600 today alone. Fantastic!
-the Centaur
I would like to purchase Blood Rock, but I have not been able to find it anywhere.... Can you direct me to a site which has it for sale? If it is in fact for sale? I am a little curious since your site says it is in Beta release, but the site has not been updated in several months, so I am unsure as to the status of the book.
Well, sorry about that ... Blogger changed their terms of service and the Dakota Frost site is frozen until I can fix it.
The answer? BLOOD ROCK is in editing right now - the publisher wanted some big cuts, but I'm in the last throes of National Novel Writing Month right now and had to put BLOOD ROCK down while working on my new series. I'm picking up BLOOD ROCK December 1st and hope to have it to the publisher before the first of the year, so if all goes well it will be out in March. I'm well into the sequel to the sequel, LIQUID FIRE, which I hope will be out the following October.
-Anthony
Once again, I have completed National Novel Writing Month! This year’s entry is the first in the Jeremiah Willstone series, THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE:
On an alternate Earth, the feminist revolution started a century early, technological progress doubled ... and Mary Shelley's granddaughter Jeremiah Willstone is an adventurer defending the world in a flying airship! She's used to fighting off monsters with nothing more than goggles, an electric gun and the advice of a half-human computer, but what will she do when her own uncle changes the rules of the game ... with a Clockwork Time Machine?
I've posted a few snippets in this series ... let me see if I can find one which doesn't give any key plot elements away.
With Patrick’s blunderblast slung over her shoulder, Jeremiah whizzed through the streets on her autocycle, discharging its cylinder flat out, its teakettle scream and clanking frame adding another layer of mist and noise to the steam and bustle of Boston. Her legs were tensed, her knees bent against the pedals, half to jump the cycle over curbs, and half to keep the juddering vibration from the cobblestones of Beacon Hill from rattling her tailbone clean off.
She squealed to a stop before the Moffat’s, pulled the cylinder and tossed it to a street urchin. “Top me off?” she asked, hopping off onto the sidewalk with a whirl and pulling her bag out of its basket in one smooth motion.
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said, taking the cycle. His eyes lighted on her vest, her denims—and on the big brass buttons on her lapels, a steering wheel, sword and airsail overlaid with a stylized V. “Are you an Expeditionary?”
Jeremiah smiled. “Yes,” she said, ruffing his cap so that tufts of blond hair showed. “Maybe one day you’ll become one too. Polish the brasslite a bit and there’s a second shilling in it for you. Quick now; I won’t be long.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, walking the cycle off.
Jeremiah turned to the tottering three-story shop, glancing up at the enclosed balcony jutting out from the newer brick buildings around it. Beneath the balcony, carbide-etched into the thick window of carbonate glass, were the words:
MOFFAT’S MECHANISMS & MYSTERIES
Her mouth quirked; as usual, today she was in the market for a bit of both.
Unlike last year, I didn't have to write 38,000 words in only ten days. But I did do pretty well; I still have a few days of writing left and I'm going to try to push further on the story.
[caption id="attachment_797" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Victory Point for Nanowrimo 2010"][/caption]
Prevail, Victoriana!
-the Centaur
At last, a day ahead on Nano ... 28580 words out of a needed 26666 ... even ahead of tomorrow, which needs 28333 ... excellent, it's all falling into place...
-the Centaur
“Then we shall follow,” Sir Alice said. “Commander Willstone!”
“Yes, sir?” Jeremiah said, standing at attention.
“It seems that Lord Christopherson has cracked the secret of travel to the past,” Sir Alice said, her own objections, once overcome, completely forgotten. “Outfit the Prince Edward with one of his own devices and hunt that blackguard down to the very ends of time,” she said. “I’ll see no-one destroy Victoriana on my watch, much less undo Liberation!”
“Yes, sir!” Jeremiah said. “Prevail, Victoriana—”
Lord Birmingham cleared his throat. “Sir Alice, might I remind you that the destination the Lady Georgiana has charted is over the dark heart of Georgia?”
[caption id="attachment_780" align="alignnone" width="600" caption="Backing Up As We Speak"][/caption]
[ Waiting waiting waiting ... ] at Fry's Electronics, because the deal on the USB hard drive I decided to get to improve my offsite backup was, indeed, too good to be true - WHOA! They just gave me another 5$ discount for waiting! Go Fry's!
So now we're backing backing backing...
-the Centaur
Oh, there was a reason I got on the Warren Ellis kick. He posted a note on what he uses to write. Maybe I'll me-too sometime and post a note on the tools I use, already having done the why and the how, but for now I wanted to focus on the following piece of wisdom from Warren Ellis which should be familiar to anyone who's ever worked on a Ph.D. thesis:
Back-ups. Oh, my god. Burning your stuff to CD or DVD is not good enough. Trust me on that. Things go wrong. Understand that Storage Will Always Fail. Always. I have a ruggedised, manly and capacious 32GB USB memory stick that can withstand fire, water, gunshots and the hairy arseteeth of Cthulhu itself — but my daughter decided she wanted to liberate one of my bags for her use, took the stick out of it and put it ’somewhere safe.’ It has never been seen again. Storage Will Always Fail.
Dropbox is your friend. 2GB of storage for free, a frankly superb little piece of software that syncs your stuff off into the cloud as easily and simply and clearly as possible. I know writers, artists and tv producers who swear by Dropbox, and so do I. I have Dropbox on both computers. If you have a smart phone of the iOS or Android type, you can also have an Dropbox instance on your phone, a fact that’s saved my arse more than once.
I also auto-sync Computer 1 hourly to Jungle Disk. Very cheap, very good. My media library lives on another storage service, Zumodrive, that lives both in the cloud and on my machine as a z:/ drive. (The Zumodrive application also lives on Computer 2.)
Also, I do all mail through Gmail. Which means that a copy of every document I send off lives in the Gmail cloud.
And every five minutes or so, a Western Digital 1TB MyBook copies everything on Computer 1’s desktop.
Paranoid? Yes. Covered? Yes.
Got that, everyone? If you write, especially if you want to do it for a living, go do something like this. And for God's sake, please, keep a copy offsite. I know too many people who have lost their homes and their art or writing to fire.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Books, Montalbano, reflected books, and Gabby - a reminder to me that my library is a potential firetrap (God forbid!) and that I should be better at storing stuff offsite.
This is not warrenellis.com. If it was, I would be more irritated, irritable ... and interesting.
(Also, Warren Ellis doesn't post me-too station idents because he's overslept for church after a long night writing. I don't think he does go to church, but if he did miss church because he'd spent a hard night writing, the minister would come to him, at the pub, when Warren Ellis was damn well ready - God being everywhere, of course, and it's the minister that would need him some Ellis. Me, I need me some God.
Stupid earlybirds. Why doesn't anybody have proper Evensong anymore?)
-the Centaur
33,569 words. 21,696 of them new. The goal for November 13: 21,666. I know technically it's November 14, but I'm going to bed now and have a full day ahead of me in which I only need to write the nominal 1,666 words, so I am officially caught up at this point. And as the graph shows, finally the rising tide of words completed has caught up with the solid line of words desired. Yaay!
Here's a bit to tide you over: rough drafty stuff, as all Nano is, but it's getting the scene set down the way I want it:
Jeremiah stepped out into the street, taking in the smells and sounds of Boston: cold air, wafting soup, crackling leather, fragrant horses, whirring gears, walking feet. God, she loved this town.
“Here you are, Commander,” a young girl said, walking her cycle up.
“Thank you, dear,” Jeremiah said, pulling the boy’s two shillings out and adding a third for the girl. “Apportion it fairly among you.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” she said—then gasped. “Oh my goodness!”
And Jeremiah followed her gaze to see the Prince Edward shimmering into existence above them, a rope ladder tumbling down towards her. “All right!” she said, leaping up onto a horse-tie, then into the air to catch the ladder.
Her weight brought it down, just slightly—taking tension in the rope, of course, not lowering the Prince Edward—and as she swung back she reached down towards the girl. “Heave it here!”
“Are you all right, Ma’am?” she cried, even as she raised the cycle.
“Never better!” she said, seizing the cycle with her free hand. Predictably the Edward didn’t wait, and in moments she was rising above the street, holding on to the ladder with one hand and the bike with the other, trusting the boomsman to keep her clear of the buildings as she ascended into one of those singular adventures that enlivened her life.
Well, National Novel Writing Month is progressing slowly but surely so far; I'm behind, but not super behind, and most importantly, not falling further behind: and the daily deficit is keeping constant. Today I have some extra time, so I will try to get caught up completely. You can see how far I've gotten on the graph below:
[caption id="attachment_734" align="alignright" width="450" caption="Progress on Nano So Far"][/caption]
I'd say this is procrastination, but it really does help to know just how far behind I am, and how much I need to write each day to catch up. Plus, I can reuse this Excel graph next year (this is actually a slight refinement of last year's Nano graph for Liquid Fire).
Also, to save time, for the first time I'm using WordPress's scheme for inserting and saving images, rather than my own. Downside: problems if I need to leave WordPress, but I'm a big boy now, and can write my own converter and URL rewriter if I need to. Upside: time, of course.
Oh, I almost forgot ... the excerpt! Here's where we are now:
Without a second thought, Jeremiah decked the guard. One fist, one punch, flying out, clocking her jaw and laying her out, ten feet out on the tile. The gun spun away, impacted, fired, the deadly bullet shattering a storefront of glass.
There were shouts, screams, and panic, but to Jeremiah’s delighted horror the crowd did not scatter like civilians. A dark-suited man saw the guard fall and came at Jeremiah; a frilly young girl in a beret saw the gun and dove for it.
“Capital,” Jeremiah said, ducking one punch, blocking the other, popping the man on the jaw, then kneeing him in the groin when he didn’t fall. “Absolutely capital!” she said, kicking the gun away into the glass just as the bereted girl seized it. Jeremiah clamped both hands on the girl’s arms to neutralize her, lifted her up, and said, “I’m so proud of you!” before head-butting so hard her beret came off and she fell back in a sudden spray of hair, eyes rolling.
“We should go,” Patrick said, shepherding Georgiana out of the darkened cave of the restaurant.
“Did you see,” Jeremiah said, blocking another punch, kicking her new assailant in the gut, then decking a third man. “These people have spines!”
“Very much so,” Georgiana said. “Good for them, but for us—”
“Fear not!” Jeremiah said; there were no more instant heroes popping out of the crowd, but there were still the shouts and screams and now whistles blowing, so it was very definitely time to go. “Follow me, thataway!”
Onward! Wind up your braces, let's do this...
-the Centaur
Editing BLOOD ROCK in response to the notes from Bell Bridge Books is progressing. It's been quite the challenge, but I've preserved the bulk of the book and got it to under 500 pages. I'm going to try to get this editing pass (#2) done today, a third editing pass done next week, and send it to the editors the following week.
-the Centaur
UPDATE: BLOOD ROCK is now 488 pages (as my personal reading copies are formatted, which is probably about 400-450 pages of a normal novel), meaning I've successfully cut 100 pages from the novel. And, as I hoped, I JUST FINISHED THE SECOND REVISION. On to pass 3. 
