First Draft

5/27/2005 08:47:00 p.m.

Finally.

Started my first draft today. My target is 1,000 words a day, 120,000 words total, but we'll see how that goes...

1,000 words today, though. So that's good.

Excerpt:

The empty city by daylight was one thing, but at night it took on an added dimension, a new and wholly alien face, and it gave Cabrell an odd kind of spiritual vertigo, even though he was the mayor.

Even in the daytime it wasn't quite right. The engineers were tweaking rotational parameters, adjusting the spectrum of the minisun, making it all a little closer to Earth-normal with each passing day. They'd effectively increased his weight, fiddling with the cylinder's speed, and with the minisun they'd pulled out some of the blue, added in some yellow and a little pinch of red. They were doing it gradually, but he still noticed. Shadows didn't quite look as sharp as he was used to. His gait felt plodding. It gave him a feeling like he was just coming into the hangover from a week-long bender, and it was going to be ugly.

Night, though, was worse. He wasn't sleeping well lately, a combination of anxiety and a lingering case of overdrive sickness, mild but protracted, and so he'd taken to wandering his city in the dim blue-green light of the minimoon. The engineers hadn't yet programmed in the phases of the moon, so it was always a fat crescent, traveling across the sky in its pre-programmed arc.

It didn't help a whit, either, that night in Caer Gwynne involved the disappearance of the curve of pseudo-valley, leaving him at the best of times feeling like he was at the top of a gentle hill, and that every step he took might be enough to unbalance him and tumble him down the gentle but long slope, gathering speed till he fetched up against a stone at the bottom, ending a bloody mess. It was ridiculous, but it's hard to argue with the inner ear.

Remember: first draft, straight from the horse's keyboard, with the internal editor as shut down as I can make him, the perfectionist little beggar.

Slack writing day

5/24/2005 09:47:00 p.m.

I should've done more, I know it. But I ended up blanking out in front of the tube, playing Crash Bandicoot. At least I wound up getting a couple gems.

I did "flake out" a half-dozen more scene snippets, though. Sometimes it flows, and sometimes it stops, and hopefully it'll flow more tomorrow and tomorrow.

I have no idea either.

5/20/2005 09:50:00 a.m.

I'd say "now I've seen everything", but every day on the Internet teaches me that you can never really say that and mean it: Crying While Eating.

Seriously, Pom-Pom, I'm about to pee my pants. « A shiny new nickel* to whoever can tell me who said that.

_________________
* And by "nickel" I mean "nothing". Sorry.

Saved!

5/17/2005 10:40:00 a.m.

Well, I've got a new drive, and a co-worker was kind enough to take my old, dead hard drive home and extract all the data off of it. So I have my stories back, calloo, callay.

Now to find out if there's still a warranty on the toasted drive, which is toasted so well that my co-worker couldn't even format it...

O Discordia!

5/13/2005 10:47:00 a.m.

My computer crapped out last night. My hard drive no longer seems to recognize sector 0, which means it's non-bootable. I hold out hope that I can at least retrieve files off of it.

It might still be on warranty, but I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Fortunately, I have most of my writing on a USB memory stick. All but the last week or so.

Still. Dammit.

On the plus side, I have a spiffy new MP3 player that my darling wife bought me last night...

On to the next one

5/10/2005 07:47:00 a.m.

Submitted "Outside, Looking In" to Asimov's Science Fiction last night. I waffled a bit, but the guidelines said that "borderline fantasy" is ok. I think my story kind of squats on that borderline.

Five weeks is their stated response-time guesstimate. So... June 13th-ish.

Wish me luck!

An Early Draft

5/06/2005 11:37:00 a.m.

For those that're interested, click the title to see the 13,000-ish word novella that I'm expanding into my "snowflake" novel Earth Fleet. The text at the link is about half the basis for Part I.

It's very rough draft, and the ending really isn't what I wanted, and there's probably going to be some confusing parts, and I'm not really selling it very well, now am I? But if you want a sneak peek at some of the characters and situations of Earth Fleet, that's the place to look.