Plop!
My local beta readers get Bunny Trouble this evening. For everyone else I have to sneak off early from work tomorrow and visit the UPS store. Watch your mailbox!
Still looking for one more beta reader. Please.
In other news, I completely rewrote my query letter… again. Now is sucks one-half less.
I am done with Bunny Trouble for a month. My time now belongs to The Baby Dancers.
Edit: Beta Reader Found. No more Bunny Trouble for you! You come back later!
Sunday Reflections, #2
“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
I win YA Sci-Fi
Susan Cooper was entertaining, but for raw, expand-the-horizons thinking, much of my Young Adult fancy belongs to Sylvia Engdahl (her blog is here). Her Children of the Star trilogy really hit home with me, and I can even recall dreaming of the last book. This Star Shall Abide is the first book in Children of the Star. Such wonderful, wonderful reading.
Much to my amazement and joy, some of her works are now back in print and she has published a new adult novel. My copy of her latest work, Stewards of the Flame is on order from Amazon.
Her books are wondrous. I adore her visionary writing, and can’t wait for my delivery of the signed YA novels I just bought. Haven’t read Ms. Engdahl? Just do it. Please.
I am a happy man. That my children will also some day read Sylvia Engdahl makes me smile, while I think of traveling beyond our our star…
Thanks and Smooches
Now I would like to thank the Lovely Wife Unit: draft two is a much better manuscript because of her tireless efforts. Out of all the corrections (and there were many!), she only made one mistake. She also convinced me to make some minor story revisions, and the manuscript tightened up because of her.
I did ask her point-blank; “You would tell me if my novel sucked, right?” and she said yes, she would. I believe her. Now if the novel does suck, you beta readers can send her flame mail for putting up with 375 pages of crap.
I love you LambChop!
Who’s yer Daddy!?!
I took draft one and made it mah beotch. Now I have draft two.
Order Summary:
Bunny Trouble.doc
375 pages
8 copies
Collated
Double sided
Black & white
Standard 70 lb. Offset paper
3-hole punch
Soon, mah prettahs, soon.
Still looking for a girl prettah.
My addiction
Can’t. Stop. Reading. Pixie Warrior by Rachael de Vienne.
Pixies
Dragons
Forests
Daughter that fits in your pocket
Peaches!
Oh man. I just wish I could purchase a physical copy of the book.
Edit: softcover version of Pixie Warrior is on the way (see comments).
13,000 Relentless Words
One day I wrote 13,000 words. It was a crucial action-packed chapter in Bunny Trouble, along with some of the text leading up to the chapter and dealing with the aftermath of the action.
While line editing Bunny Trouble, I realized that singular day of writing was my best yet. It is a complicated action scene—as modern engagements are—but it flows nicely. It also held less typographical and grammatical errors than the rest of the manuscript.
Huh. What do I make of that?
I have no idea!
Line editing my own work is a pain in the ass that is for sure: a big incentive to tighten up writing the first draft. I regret not line editing my first novel for this reason. Now I know.
Only 20 pages left, and then Beta Reading Squad Doki Doki Team Alpha Fox SIX gets a whack. I have not cut my nails in awhile for this reason.
Take your candlelight vigil and shove it up your ass
Denial is a bitch. It is all around us. It is a wrapper of societal drag around the instruments of doom. Denial is the anti-truth, the self-delusion, the decent into groupthink and the basis of the anti-individual.
Denial is subversion.
Denial is the lie.
Is helplessness a learned trait?
Yes. Yes it is.
As I am finishing my line editing of Bunny Trouble I can see the next novel stretch out before me. It is a bleak story. Why would the eternal optimist fathom such a grim tale?
Why indeed. The answer, my 7.3 readers, is all around us. You merely have to seek the truth of what is, rather than what you wish it to be.
Tempered with shadow
Least you 7.3 readers think I am all fluffy frou-frou from that last post; I can assure you my optimism comes tempered with shadow.
I have seen… experienced… bad things, two bad things to be precise. These two things, almost in an ironic fashion, have canceled each other out because they were so contrary: one a product of people (there are bad people in this world), the other a product of fate (you can be in the wrong place at the wrong time). Once I became older, I was able to reflect on the nature of conflicts, giving me an insight for which I am now grateful.
Shadow falls across my writing because of who I am. In the dim, the shade is colder but in the chill, we can feel more alive. My writing is not reflective as much as it is holistic. For every conflict, there are a thousand solutions. The path we follow to the end has less to do with the process of elimination and more of our gestalt.
We are more than the sum of our experiences. This I know to be true.
