Tag: AI

Friends and Allies

Chose the winning design for the cover of my next novel:  The Saga of Nichole 5:  Part 1 – Friend & Ally.  It still needs a little tweaking, so I shan’t roll it out quite yet.

In other news, I’m also getting back into the habit of writing.  I have to:  if I am about to publish a book called ‘Part 1’ I tanjed well better have a ‘Part 2’ lined up on deck and ready for launch.  Of course, I don’t.  Quite.

I hand-wrote about two pages of notes yesterday.  That’s something for a pantser such as myself.  Still, with all the RealWorld things I had to do about the house today, at least I was able to lay down a few words for Act I.

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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?

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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?!”

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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!

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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!

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The Second Bridge, Coda, pt2

This is taking on a life of its own.  Just as most of my stories do.  I’m not letting myself get dragged into a discussion of biomechanics for pt3, so I’ll deal with that as quickly as I can.  Especially as I’ve heard Gary’s last words in the last scene.  I must return to the 2nd edition of Echoes of Family Lost and the copy-edit of The Saga of Nichole5.

I also must keep writing each day.  Tricky, that.

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The Second Bridge, Coda, pt1

I was just tooling around the keyboard, kinda thinking I’d write a story about Faustina.  I wrote two paragraphs.  Two days went by.  Nothing.  I looked at the third paragraph.

“I can turn this into a glimpse both into what happened after Henge was made, as well as a tinier glimpse eighteen months into her future.”

And…

“Who’s Lauren?”

I deleted the first two paragraphs and tried again.

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Empire’s Agent, pt.9

“Hasten slowly.”  Twenty quatloos – and a free, signed copy of the second edition of “The Fourth Law” to the first person who identifies who is best known for that quote:  hasten slowly.

It begins to come out that while they are total strangers, Arpad and Lily do know quite a bit about one another.  And it seems they both like what they’ve discovered.  Lily’s past is still a splinter in her mind; I know that there are things as bad in his.  He’s old enough that his father could have been in the AVO, and so despised.  Hell, maybe he’s Orban’s love child?… we’ll see!

It’s lunch time and the sun’s warm!

PS  And yes, that’s Lily’s silhouette in the center in black.  Cute girl.

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Empire’s Agent, pt.8

Nasty outbreak of DayJob, today:  my boss’s dotted-line boss was in for the annual audit.  I did my best to stay invisible.  In that time, I was able to see far beyond what I’ve written here.  But, it was a 10-hour day, so:  rest.

I have to tell this from Arpad’s POV because I didn’t understand just how – even with Ai’s family – how alone Lily is as she approaches thirty years old.  I’m not cutting her parts out, but limiting them for poignancy.

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