Starting Small, Dreaming Big
Christmastide is on February 2. If your parish does the blessing of the throats on the feast of St. Blaise (February 3), maybe give it a shot. We need all the help we can get these days.
In other news, my editors/first readers sent back Spiderstar, the sequel to Shadow Captain, with their notes, so revisions will be ongoing for probably the next few weeks. Also need to work on the cover. Stay tuned.
Well that didn’t last long. Twitter was fun, but enabled too much of the snarkier, ruder side of my personality, and exposed me (even with the world’s most aggressive blocking approach) to more negative news than is probably good for me. After being seeing how rude I had gotten in my comments on another person’s WordPress site, I decided to deactivate my twitter account, to reduce the dopamine hits I’ve been getting from my own snark, and see if that helps. I’ve been neglecting my own WordPress site, so will try to focus more attention on that, and generally do my best to mind my own business.
Complete at a shade under 94,000 words. Next step is to get it out of Scrivener and into a Word document for my volunteer editors to review. They will be out of town for part of this coming week, so I have a little bit of a breather to get the Word document ready. I should feel more triumphant than I do, but I’ve been fighting with this one in one form or another since November 2020, so by now all I can muster is a bit of weary relief, in the style of Best Van Helsing.
Right now, I’m still revising the sequel to Shadow Captain. So, basically, this is going to be more of a NaNoEdMo until I get that completed. If I somehow miraculously get done in the first half of November, I might try for an actual first-drafting project, in the NaNo tradition. I have occasionally managed full 50K words in two-ish weeks, but it’s been a long time. So, here’s a cover version of my NaNoWriMo theme song, because somehow this situation doesn’t seem to call for Jerry Reed.
Okay, that might have been a overly click-baity way of talking about the fact that A. A. Milne (author of Winnie-the-Pooh), once adapted Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the stage. The BBC broadcast a radio version in 1967, with Derek Jacobi voicing Darcy. Surviving copies of the play in book-form will set you back a few hundred dollars, but you can listen to the radio adaptation for free.
Thanks to the auto-narrator function at Google Play, I now have audio book versions of four of my novels available:
Shadow Captain
Marrying a Monster
Waking the Dreamlost
Loving a Deathseer
Right now I am working on polishing Shadow Captain’s sequel. I hope to have it published by late December of this year, at which point it will spend 90 days in Kindle Unlimited so that the KU readers of the first book can enjoy it. The audiobook for the sequel will be made available around the time it comes to Google Play, sometime in 2023. Once I have Shadow Captain’s sequel completed, the focus will be on re-editing the Ancestors of Jaiya novels in preparation for their audiobook release, and on a new project to be announced later.
Happy Listening!
The Pentagon would have you believe that the truth is out there, although I am not entirely clear on when we started taking the Pentagon’s word for this stuff. I don’t know whether the truth is out there or not, but some days I suspect Robur the Conqueror is.
(Please Note: the film version of Master of the World features Robur’s much more generic airship from the prequel, Clipper of the Clouds. If you watch the film, you will get to see both Vincent Price and Charles Bronson doing their thing, but you won’t get to see any Steampunk Triple Changer that can function as an aircraft, automobile, and submarine.)
There are writers who, when they speak of their Muse, are basically personifying their subconscious mind. (e.g. “My Muse won’t give me the rest of the story, it just gives me the opening of a different story. Argh!”) If it works for them, great, and if it doesn’t work for them, it’s not my job to tell them what to do instead. I don’t know what I’m doing half the time myself. I do know that my subconscious is me, and that I’ve not derived any particular benefit from trying to personify it as an Other.
Continue reading “Thoughts for Weird Wednesday: The Measure of a Muse” →You can’t sleep so you work on the back story for your gaslamp fantasy idea, and realize that you need to invent an extra daughter for Queen Victoria, in the 20-month gap between Princess Helena and Princess Louise, to be the mother of one of the characters in the gaslamp fantasy.
I just completed the new ending and some of the expansion scenes for Star Master Book 2. For more about the long, complicated evolution of this space opera novel, see here, here and here. Yes, I have been working on this book for a while, but I hope to have it out by the end of this year, especially since I have no plans to do NaNoWriMo.
For now, my plans are a short break to work up a presentation for day job, play mobile games, read Golden Age mysteries, watch Fringe and Don Matteo with family members, and brainstorm whatever comes after the Star Master duology.
Jaglion Press