Good morning, squiders. We’re having new trees put it to replace the seven (7! 50 ft or more tall!) trees we lost during the tornado. Only four (my arborist says we have to wait a few years to put trees back where there were ones growing, so the root system can decay enough that a new tree can establish itself), and relatively small (between 8 and 12 feet tall, though taller than we thought we were going to be able to afford) but it will be nice to have some trees again. Fingers crossed that they all survive and establish themselves and are happy campers.
I ordered books to sell at MileHiCon and most of the copies of Hidden Worlds arrived damaged. Because of course. I tried to return them with the thought Amazon would just replace them and send me some new ones, but apparently because they’re author copies, they don’t do that, and shipping costs almost as much as the books themselves. If I ever get a free minute I’m going to go bother Amazon customer support but I don’t maintain hope. Sigh.
Also looked more closely at my panels for the year, and I had to email the programming director and ask to drop the indie publishing one, which is tragic. Why are the best panels always the ones I can’t make? But I have a charity gala that night and I’m already going to miss a chunk of it with a different panel (though I would have kept this one if I could). Alas.
I also got another reading panel this year, this one on -punks, and I did have a -punk story published earlier this year, so I can read that, though I don’t know how long the story can be. Hooray for not having to find a story a few hours before. But I did realize I hadn’t gotten paid for said story so I had to email the editor for that too.
Anyway, I did make a to do list for the convention, which mainly consists of making sure I know where everything is and packing it up, and–oh, cripes, I never requested a co-op table spot. Did I? Good grief.
Okay, now I have done that.
Yes, packing things up and printing out some things if I don’t have any more (flyers and business cards), making sure people can give me money, and getting ready for my panels. (I am on a panel with Mary Robinette Kowal! I may die.)
Otherwise, Chapter 11 is going okay. Needs some rework in the middle but I haven’t gotten there yet. May need to ponder Malana’s motivations in general. I’m afraid I may have left some of them in the dust as we’ve moved into Act 2 so I’m going to stare extra hard at those. Critique group on chapters 9 and 10 this weekend, so we’ll see what they say on the non-marathoned chapters (and also if I did drop some of Malana’s stuff in Cpt 9).
I did very briefly poke around and see where I was keeping potential novel ideas, for Nano, which I am not doing despite all my brain seems to not understand that. And the answer is…I don’t really have a good system. What I seem to have done is to make a Google Doc for a story idea when I have it (“Backyard RPG story idea,” “Maze Story Idea”) and they are all separate and hence impossible to find if you don’t remember what you called the document.
(Ask me how long it took me to find my planning document for the story that became Across Worlds with You)
So I think, if nothing else, I need a better organization system. A master document, with links to the other documents. And I KNOW that somewhere I have a big long list of novel ideas but apparently that is NOT on the cloud so now I’m going to have to go looking for that stupid thing. (And hope it’s not on the external hard drive that I currently have no way to access because I lost the power cord.)
Looking back over these documents has been somewhat good for the “help I haven’t had an idea in years” existential crisis I had last week. Because in most cases, the idea is just a premise, or maybe a setting or some characters. They all need to be built up. Very rarely do I get the whole story in a dream.
(Though I did have a story-y dream last night. Will ponder. Or forget it, as dreams go.)
In one case, the document is literally a list of Arthurian texts with the sentence “If I ever get around to doing an Arthurian based novel” at the top.
My writing forums and groups are all in Nano mode, so I have had other ideas as well. Someone mentioned rewriting a novel, and I do have one that I need to do that for–full rewrite, not a revision. But you do have to, you know, plan that stuff out, or you get a rewritten novel that’s just as bad as the first time you do it. Another friend has been using a Discord bot to get writing prompts, some of which I might steal because they did set off delicious ideas in my head. But not necessarily to write for Nano.
Because I’m not doing Nano.
Seriously.
I may consider a compromise, though. Maybe a novella? 20K-30K words on something new. A collection of interconnecting short stories. Something like that.
We’ll see how I feel after I organize my ideas.
Happy Friday, squiders. See you guys next week.
