Yikes! Okay, so I’ve often had the tendency to make a nice long to do list, then realize that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Now I am working on stuff people actually care about, so coming upon the realization that I’ve done so once again is doubly distressing. Before I get to that mess though, let’s talk about the good stuff.
Myn, with my hand for size comparison purposes (and also holding purposes)
Myn showed up in the mail the other day, sent as you know by Aimee (website). I love the way it came out, but I suspect that there will be a few changes if and when this prototype turns into a full-fledged product. For one, the eyes (which are super neat) probably wouldn’t be mass producible. That actually might be the only change, now that I look at it. I’d sent some emails to a small manufacturer here in the US, and after some good back and forth initially they sort of went silent. I’ll keep poking at them, but if anyone has any contacts in the plush manufacturing world, I’m all ears.
Then there’s this…
Generally speaking, Lain looking at you like that is the last thing you’ll ever see.
Yes, there’s another gorgeous figurine on the way, courtesy of Lindsey Hein (website). It is early in the process, but it already looks ridiculously good. I’m as eager as you are to see this thing finished and painted.
Right, so that’s the pretty stuff out of the way, let’s dig into the ugly stuff. One of the best parts of being an indie author is that there aren’t any deadlines unless you set them yourself. One of the worst parts about being an indie author is that you slowly realize why published authors tend to have things like deadlines. I’ve drawn a few lines in the sand for myself, and they are rapidly approaching. The first has to do with The Other Eight. This story has been finished for a while, but it wasn’t quite right. I scheduled some time with an editor and used it as a motivator to get the work done. I’m confident I’ll pull that off, but if I don’t it just means that the book will have one or two fewer scenes than I’d intended. That usually happens anyway.
The next deadline is this year’s NaNoWriMo. I wrote The Other Eight last year, mostly by the seat of my pants. Because of this, it came out extremely rough. Since I’ve got some secret plans for this NaNoWriMo project, I need to pump it out in a form that is much more complete at the end of the month. That means I need to do some character planning and plot brainstorming in advance. (This is allowed by the rules of NaNoWriMo, by the way. As long as you don’t write any of the actual text of the novel before the start of November, pre-production is a-okay.) Thus, if you go to the Next Project Survey you’ll find that the NaNoWriMo question has been removed. (You can still vote on the next Book of Deacon book, however.)
The final tally on the Survey had Near-Future Sci-Fi, Urban Fantasy, and Steampunk within two points of one another, but votes from other sources ended up pushing Steampunk into the lead, so it looks like I’ll be writing something with brass and leather and goggles and airships after all. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Steampunk is a genre where society didn’t technologically advance much past Victorian Era, Jules Verne-style mechanisms. It is also the claim to fame of Lindsay Buroker, with whom I recently shared a bundle. Her books have long been on my to-read list. I’ve now decided to save them until after I write my own Steampunk, just to be double sure I don’t accidentally “borrow” any of her ideas. I’m paranoid about writing an idea thinking I came up with it, then realizing months or years later that I was just remembering it from elsewhere. (For those interested, when you misremember the origin of a thought, it is called cryptomnesia.) Since I have a terrible tendency to refer to my books by their genre when working on them, I decided to give this one the working title “Free-wrench”. So we’ll stick with that. To satisfy the rules of NaNoWriMo I’ll have to write it to be 50,000 words or more, and entirely in the month of November. To satisfy my own evil plot, I’ll need to have the second draft done two weeks after. It’s going to be crazy.
And wedged into this whole mess is my usual nine to six job, and this weekend’s New York Comic Con. It all reminds me of a picture one of my fans gave me for my birthday.
Which one of those guys do you think I am right now?
Thanks for reading!