This did not end where I expected. I knew Teresa would look into what’s going on out east. A play for the throne? Wow. I am now reacting to, not writing, this story. I must make haste slowly.
Category: science fiction
‘Friend & Ally’
If you’d care to chime in on what you want to see as my next novel’s cover, please drop in and vote. I very much value y’all’s opinion.
0 AND 1
A good two days: even with the icepick, by drinking iced tea all morning until around 1230, followed by a switch-over to wine, I can up with 1900 word like this. I’ve lots of careful groundwork I need to lay down before… well…
Make haste slowly.
Blazing
Busy with sorting cover designs for Friend & Ally. Of course, that’s no excuse for not writing. What is was my neck: in trying to stop a piece of paper from falling off a desk at work, I’ve done something horrible to my neck. I wake up feeling fine, but if I tilt my head forward – as in, reading a screen, repackaging meds, snapping together IVs, prepping things in the isolation hood – for more than twenty minutes, it’s as if there’s an ice pick in the upper left of my neck. I come home tanjed near shaking and in tears from the pain. It laughs at ibuprofen. Friday night I took a Flexeril and a bottle of wine and this AM was less bad, at least to the point I was able to start laying down the story of Nichole5 Part 2.
I’ll admit that it started where I expected but ended up where I did not. I’d seen the ‘catching fish’ part. Everything after that… news to me! But great exposition and exploration of Nichole’s character. I wonder what they’ll say to each other in the morning?
Nichole5: Part 2 Prologue
I love prologues that are also spoilers. It then is incumbent upon the writer to make the reader forget it until the last few pages. Every new novel of mine must have a personal challenge I’ve never tried before, and this is it.
I’m continuing to get good prototypes in via 99designs.com for the cover of ‘Friend and Ally,’ the first book about Nichole. Entries will be open until Friday. I’ll also have to think of a sub-title for this second book. Reflecting the first, it’ll be “something and something,” but I’ve no idea. I’ve time enough; and worlds.
Below the fold is how the story ends. As David Byrne once asked, “Well? How did I get here?!”
Watts up with The Fourth Law?
Having revised, re-edited, and re-covered my first novel – Amazon has me in the Science Fiction ghetto country club, but all my stories are really about relationships, in this case, between friends – I’ve been serializing it on Wattpad.
I’ve gotten very little traction to-date. The site is mostly populated by Gen Zyklon; my eldest daughter says she reads it for the ecchi fan-fiction, but I’m open to trying new markets. Still and all, if there’s no pickup in readership, I’ll be closing that tent in a week.
Until then, if you care to read about cute machines and humans doing cute things, please drop by!
https://www.wattpad.com/story/148803084-the-fourth-law
Look. Out.
Sent the 80k-word manuscript of TSoN5,P1,F&A… and I do NOT like that title, to my copyeditor today. Since it’s part one that implies a part two that I’d best be about.
Drank & stared off into the distance. That is, what I do every evening. And I began to jot down some possible plot ideas.
The Second Bridge, Coda, pt5 (end)
Short? Sure it is. Abrupt? I don’t think so. Lampshade hung? I thought I did, both in the main story and this coda.
Consider: the “short” story of ‘The Second Bridge’ came in at 11.4k words. This “little” bonus ending is 4900 words. Sometimes, no matter how interesting these people are, I need to walk away for other projects.
To wit: my copyeditor has returned the 2nd edition of ‘Echoes of Family Lost.’ This weekend shall be spent implementing those changes. I tell you: no matter how you might prize your storytelling, when an editor hands back a manuscript – that you thought was fine – essentially bleeding red ink… it’s an incredibly humbling experience.
Thanks, everyone, for reading about Henge and her families. I hope you love them all as much as I do. After this weekend’s editing, we’ll be off again!
The Second Bridge, Coda, pt4
Question: is there anyone, besides me, stupid enough to think that I would wrap things up tonight? I really planned and wanted to. It’s all in my head! But it’s already 1.5L bottle of wine o’clock and tomorrow’s DayJob promises to be awful.
Part Five is it! I swear! Even if I have to wait three days and make it 10k words long!
The Second Bridge, Coda, pt3
Ate dinner. Put down 800 words. No one else here. Why the heck not keep going? So: 1200.
I’ll be wrapping all this up – well, sorta – in part 4. Gary figures out what he wants to do with his life and we flick back to ‘present time’ with Lauren and Henge riding home after fishing. I learned something very surprising about present-time Henge today!
machciv 