Tag Archives: hmmm

Aug
24

And Then What Happens?

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I was doing a little hard drive clean up last night and ran across the beginnings of some sort of ficlet. It’s clearly not finished and I can’t remember why I wrote it. (Probably for one of those 500 word blog contests or something, but  who knows.) But I got to the end of it and was like…that’s it? Where’s the rest of it??? I don’t even have a title for it, but here goes: OOO The Holly King found her eating berries beneath the Hawthorn, her chin stained crimson. The snow princess hunched miserably in the shelter of the skeletal branches, her naked skin as pale as the frost upon the rushes. The juice dripped from her lips as she shoveled another handful into her mouth, her dark eyes glaring at him in rebellion. “I won’t go back,” she snapped as he squatted down beside her, his dark boots… Read more
Jul
11

Popping the Culture

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So I’ve got my first pass pages for A Trace of Moonlight sitting on my desk – my last real chance at making any last edits, catching typos – the small stuff. They always say not to sweat the small stuff, but in this case small stuff can sometimes make a big difference. Pop culture is always changing – so sometimes a reference I’ve made in a book made perfect sense when I wrote it…and doesn’t a few months later. Case in point, the above passage is a rather snide commentary aimed at the Mass Effect 3 ending debacle. (The main issue was the the overall outcome seemed to be the same no matter what you did. To say gamers were upset would be an understatement of gross proportions.) Which is fine, except that a few weeks ago, Bioware released an extended ending DLC that attempted to give the player… Read more
Dec
9

The Last Leg

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I’m in the last bits of the A Trace of Moonlight draft. 85k written – about another 15k to go. Though really, 100k is just the ballpark figure. A little more, a little less – it doesn’t really matter. I’ll be fleshing things out quite a bit as I restructure part of the plot, so I don’t worry about final counts until I’ve got something I’m actually happy with. I think the final word count for A Brush of Darkness was 102k when it went to print…A Sliver of Shadow exploded to about 117k at one point, but I narrowed it down to 110k at the end. (And I’d say the standard UF/PNR usually runs 90k to 120k for trad publishing. Epic fantasy can be longer, but it’s also harder to break into if a publisher doesn’t want to spend the extra print money.) When it comes down to it,… Read more