Category: Writing

Friday Fragment: Dealing With The Dog

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This is not what most people would think of as an action sequence, but it involved a surprising amount of choreography (or maybe what the theater people call “blocking”, I don’t know). Basically, the characters’ movements ended up being somewhat different in the final scene relative to what we see below:

Bertram jumped to his feet, turned and snatched his chair, holding it out between him and the dog as if he were a lion-tamer. His secretary, Julius Muller, stood up abruptly a moment later. The dog was barking furiously and jumping up and down in place.
I discreetly hitched up my skirt and started to pull my knife out of the sheath I wore on my thigh, but Maxim stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Stay calm, everyone,” he said to the room at large.
I understood what he meant now that I was watching the dog more closely. With his bouncing movements and lashing tail, the mastiff didn’t seem angry, just excited. Maxim rose to his feet and moved toward the animal.

Friday Fragment: Talking to a Journalist

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So, Maxim got ambushed by intrepid reporter Carl Visser, who’s sort of a homage to a certain Darren McGavin character. This bit got cut out when I was doing final (meaning human) dictation cleanup, because the conversation went in another direction:

I eyed Carl in the same way Bertram had. “As you may have gathered from last night, I know the Prime Minister somewhat well. Any ideas I have about why the Weapons Committee would take an interest in the Beast Garden District, I would not be able to share with you.”

“But there is some kind of reason for their interest?” he asked.

“I have theories,” I said. “I don’t have anything I can prove. And if you attempt to quote me on any of this, I will deny it and sue you.”

Carl cracked a half-smile. “What, you don’t want your friend the Prime Minister to get upset?”

“I don’t think you want Bertram upset with you either,” I told him mildly. “I suggest you focus on finding out who in the Beast Garden District has a trained attack dog of the appropriate size, weight, and muzzle shape.”

Friday Fragments: Who Will Be Emperor?

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This is a tricky sequence to write in the third Hunter Healer King book, because a similar conversation foreshadowing it occurs towards the end of the second Hunter Healer King book. The bit of dialogue below was cut when I reworked the conversation in the WIP and it went in a different direction:

“I agree that Father Feuerbach is a good man to have at your back in a crisis,” Maxim went on, “But the Imperial throne does not, in its current form, attract that kind of crisis.”

Friday Fixes

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Last November, I thought I had gotten Undead Flight into pretty decent shape, and looking ahead to a logistically complicated Thanksgiving, thought, “Gee, I might as well push it out the door now.” From a certain point of view: this was the correct move. My grandmother fell terminally ill in early December, I traveled out there once to see her before she passed, and once again for the funeral. It was only around Christmas time that my mother bought a copy of Undead Flight and brought me the bad news: I hadn’t made all the changes she and my father had advised. So, a week or so back, I sat down with a copy of the book loaded on kindle and my trusty notebook, made notes of what needed to be fixed, and made the fixes last weekend. Then Amazon randomly threw a hissy fit about the print cover, so I had to adjust that. (There was a violent stomach bug in between Amazon fussing about my print cover and me feeling well enough to do something about it.) Anyway, by the time you read this on Friday, Undead Flight should be…not perfect, but but improved. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Weird Wednesday: Discovery Writing

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I feel like there’s sometimes a tendency among writing gurus to pretend that either you systematically plot everything beat by beat, or you only write the story as it spontaneously generates in your head, with no notes or thoughts about how it’s going. As it happens, I’m reading History of the Lord of the Rings right now. Tolkien is usually described as a discovery writer, and the people who say that are not wrong, but he didn’t necessarily sit around waiting for inspiration to strike either…

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Friday Fragments: Chloe and the Wolf

Posted on Posted in Dictation, Fantasy, Mystery, Myth, Steampunk, Weird Science, World Building, WritingTagged , Leave a comment

An example of me getting a bit rambly during the previous week’s dictation session. This got cut because Maxim’s cousin Victor interjected himself into the conversation earlier than I originally thought. And it’s not entirely in character for Maxim to try to shield Chloe to that extent.

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