As of this moment the novel stands at 67,493 words. The Fourth of July screwed me up a bit and I ended up being 2500 words under my weekly goal of 10K words but I’m getting astonishingly close to the finish line. I suspect I’ll have the first draft done before the month is out, and that makes me happy. The big question is whether I’ll have time to continue revisions after the semester starts. Like with all things pertaining to writing, as long as I don’t allow that to be an excuse, I think I can work on it fairly steadily during the semester.

It will be interesting to reread the whole thing from beginning to end. The last 4K word section, for instance, was a treatise on genie genealogy. Does that work? I dunno, but it was fun to write and kept my momentum moving forward. A lot of the character relationships need more depth. The hero’s sister is mentioned in the opening chapter and her name is dropped here and there, but she’s a major factor in the last third of the book. She needs to be addressed in more than just passing in the first two-thirds if I expect readers to be interested in her once she comes on stage.

It’s also funny how things that I thought were important, like having evenly balanced sections of roughly the same length and similar arcs, probably won’t be in the end. In order to strictly follow the Theseus cycle (which the events are loosely based) the story would have to make some twists and turns I don’t want. Jeff Ford told me at Clarion that you can’t afford to let yourself be tied to the mythology you’re working from, so I’m taking that advice. One of the great joys of writing this book have been all of the nifty things that connect that I didn’t really intend. There’s a lot of bull/ Minotaur/ labyrinth stuff going on that I didn’t do on purpose, but Fred supplied it and it fits in pretty well. I don’t know if the story necessarily shouts that it’s a modern retelling of the Theseus cycle, but the echoes are certainly there. Writing’s neat that way.

And what’s not neat are lost submissions and responses. I found out yesterday after querying that a 160-day submission pending response was not actually pending; the response got lost somewhere in the shuffle, and it was a “No thanks” to boot.

Out of 125 submissions, that’s my fifth instance of something getting lost in transit, either coming or going. (One of those stories, “Working Out Our Salvation,” ended up getting published after the resubmit.) I don’t blame publishers any more than I blame myself. Postal mail occasionally does get lost or mangled beyond recognition, and then there’s the whole matter of keeping the SASE with the manuscript and yada yada yada. It sucks, but it happens, even with electronic submissions.

Frankly, I don’t understand not carefully tracking submissions. It’s hard to remember what you sent where and when without at least a spreadsheet. My database may be dorky, but I do get useful stats from it. I was teased as being a geek in one of my grad workshops for keeping a database, and I may well be one; but I am a very organized, well-informed geek.

I think my WordPress upgrade went okay yesterday, and I’m also trying to migrate my many email accounts to Thunderbird. It took a lot of fiddling but I think it works now. Again, if you notice weird stuff drop me a line, but I think this is stable ground.

Current Mood: Fine |
Currently Listening To - Wilco - “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”