Now Evil Hat is going for The Big Stretch.

If they hit $15,000, they’ll be producing a stand-alone SotC pulp fiction novel by Atomic Robo creator Brian Clevinger. Brian will be writing about Benjamin Hu–think Sherlock Holmes from Hong Kong, running around like Indiana Jones as an olympic-class fencer.

And if they hit $20,000, I get to write the next one.

My character is Amelia Stone, the Spirit of Justice! She’s tough as nails, lives by her fists and her wits, and is so full of pulpy goodness I could squee. I’ve been desperately wanting to try my hand at crazy in-your-face no-holds-barred no-apologies-given pulp since I started reading the ERB Mars books, and this opportunity was too awesome to pass up. I cannot *wait* to give this a shot, and, well you guys aren’t going to let me down, right? You’re, er, going to go forth and, er, make me write another novel this year, right? You’re, um…

…I’ve done it to myself again, haven’t I. :)

No, really, I actually have the time to do this and I’m tremendously excited about the chance, so please! Go forth and help make it happen! There are loads of awesome rewards and exciting potential, and this is a crazy fun chance for me to do something I will probably never have another opportunity to do, so, um, I’m gonna be over here in the corner holding my breath while we wait to see what happens.

Watch the skies!

Twenty-one short stories. This from someone who does not consider herself to be a short story writer*. 11 of them were for crowdfunded projects (ie, you had to buy in to get them, and still can, until Saturday evening, for the Old Races Short Story Project!). Two were for anthologies and two for next year’s BABA YAGA’S DAUGHTER collection of Old Races stories. The other six were Gryphon Beach stories, which I have faint hopes of selling to a children’s publisher at some point, so will not be making available for general consumption.

I am not going to be writing 21 short stories in 2012. o.O

I *do* anticipate doing some more Gryphon Beach Storytelling Hours, probably as a crowdfunded effort instead of just a free-for-all this time. And I have 4 more stories to write for the “No Dominion” Kickstarter campaign, and one short story under contract. So I may do a dozen or so shorts next year, but I believe I’ll restrain myself from doing a second ORSSP (though the temptation is MIGHTY), and try hard to just stick with the books I need to write. And the graphic novel script. :)

Yes, yes, I’m saying it here in public, where I will no doubt get mocked mercilessly if I go back on my word (which we all must admit seems very, very likely): a dozen short stories, a graphic novel script, and the contracted-for books/novellas.

Unless something irresistable comes along. :)

*Actually no longer true, and not just because of this year. It became clear to me a year or two ago that in fact I do write short stories. But for the longest time, no, I really didn’t see myself as someone who did. (And I thought I should, so I sat down and started practicing. See where that led?!?! :))

The “No Dominion” Kickstarter campaign is at just below $13K right now, with a week left to go. And I have reached the peculiar point of now being afraid to mention it much, when in fact normally one would be going OMG HOLY CRAP HOW HIGH CAN WE GO?!?!?!

Because at $15K I’ve promised another novella, but with all the little stuff I’ve thrown in, another novella at $15K isn’t really cost-effective. I mean, there are four short stories, and a chapter of HEAVEN CAN WAIT, and not only have I got a novella listed at $15K, but I also (rashly, but I fear I’m still rather enthusiastic about the idea o.o) promised 2 more chapters of HEAVEN CAN WAIT at that dollar amount too. I mean, on the positive side, I did make it clear those were deadline-at-my-discretion, but even so, I’m finding myself in this weird position of going “crap, I hope it either peaks at about $13.5-14K or goes all the way to like $17 or $18K…” And I hate to close it down early because I said I’d run it for six weeks and I by God think I should, so I’m a bit flaily here!

Truth in crowdfunding, lads, that’s what this is. :) So guide me, intarwebs! Shall I sit here being mum or shall I see just how darned far this horse will go?

Also, can I just say HOLY CRAP 360 BACKERS!!! That’s just shy of TWO HUNDRED more than have signed on for any of my other crowdfunding projects! I don’t know if it’s because it’s Walker Papers/Gary vs Old Races, or if it’s because it’s Kickstarter, or if I’ve flogged it more or if it’s been RT’d more or what, but HOLY CRAP!

(I will of course write the second novella if the campaign hits $15K, because I said I would! Just in case this made anybody wonder. It’s just that only in retrospect am I appreciating the flaws in my plans. :))

It all immediately spiraled out of control. Michelle Sagara is making popcorn to nibble on while she watches us do our Book Race. She alone among many seems to be holding out against the challenge–Laura Anne Gilman, Kari Sperring, and Kate Elliott have also signed on, and it looks like Alma Alexander is also teetering on the edge of doing so. :)

The book I’m aiming to write in 5 weeks is a middle grade novel about pirates and lost princes, and should only be about 60K words, which isn’t actually impossible in 5 weeks. Chaz is 13K into an 80K novel, Laura Anne’s 15K into a 70K novel, Kari’s 4K into a–I don’t know, actually, how long hers is!–Kate’s aware that realistically she’s not going to get one of her amazing behemoth epics done in 5 weeks, and Alma, like me, is just starting out.

So I think that while the stated goal is a novel in 5 weeks, that the average of what we’re aiming for is also around 60K in 5 weeks.

Also, *technically* this is going to be spread over 8 weeks, since Chaz, who instigated this whole thing, is otherwise occupied for 3 of the next 8 weeks. But since at least half of us have other stuff that needs doing, too, I figure those of us aiming for around 60K have 5 of those 8 weeks to work on the Book Race Novel, and those (like Kate) who are definitely going for the long end and who may not have other projects pending can have the whole eight and we’ll all announce a final wordcount on, like, October 1. Seems fair enough, right?

If anybody else wants to join the madness I see no reason you should not! We start Monday, August 8. :)

(LJ usernames in order, just in case you’re not following one of them and want to be: , , , , , .)

There is a book I’ve been trying to write since I was twelve years old. It’s called RIGHT ANGLES TO FAIRYLAND, and it’s a traditional YA fantasy novel: Five children discover a fairy circle on Midsummer’s Day, and make their way into a Fairyland torn apart by centuries of strife–on one side is Fairy, caught in Winter, and on the other side, Goblin, bound to endless Summer. The five make allies on opposite sides of the conflict, and individually go on quests that will help to bring the shattered land back together–or destroy it forever.

I wrote the rough draft in 2002. It was the best thing I’d ever written. It probably still is the best thing I’ve ever written. But it has languished unrevised for most of a decade now, for the simple and rather pragmatic reason that people keep paying me to write other things. I literally haven’t been able to afford to revise this book which is closest to my heart.

Last week I was dumbstruck by the idea of making the Angles revisions a crowdfunded project. It gives me a deadline, it gives those readers who want to participate by buying in an opportunity to read a full novel, and it gets it done. So that’s what I’m going to do.

The Angles commission will probably run for six months, as I’m setting a delivery deadline of July 1, 2011, but there’s a catch:

I may close the commission as early as April 14, 3 months from now, if I get it done by then. I may give 24 hours’ notice about it closing, or I may not. I’ll post about this monthly or so, in order to remind people, but I won’t ride it any harder than that. So if you want in, don’t faff about too long. :) (I know I’ve just put up the short stories commissions, too, which is why there’s a 3-month window on this–a bunch of people who may not have much spare cash have already bought in to the short stories, so I don’t want to double-tap them in January.)

Given that this is an actual novel, not just a novella or short stories, I’m going to go ahead and set a $15 buy-in, since my novels tend to be trade paperbacks with approximately that price tag.

And, because this is a revision project, I can for once give you a really decent teaser: Here are the first three unrevised chapters of RIGHT ANGLES TO FAIRYLAND. (Do bear in mind I wrote this almost ten years ago, and don’t judge me too harshly. :))

As usual, the finished story will be delivered via email as a PDF (and *maybe* in ebook format–leave a note in the Paypal transaction if there’s an e-format you’d like to have it delivered as) on or before July 1, 2011.

Seriously, that sounds all tooting our own horn (and it is), but the only thing I had to do with it at all was page proofs for my essays, so I hardly have a horse in this race. I did, though, end up skimming through everybody’s essays and information, and holy moly, we have some really, really good advice in there. I mean, really truly good stuff. Things that I wished I’d known when I was getting started. Things that are still insanely useful to learn now. I mean, like, I have a copy of this book and I want a copy of this book. That’s how awesome it is.

HOW TO WRITE MAGICAL WORDS is now available for pre-order through the publishers, and *believe* me, the writer in your life wants a copy. Plus, if you order it now, the publisher will ship it to you for a nickel, so the total cost of the book, including shipping, is $18.00 even.

They believe orders placed now *should* get to you by Christmas, and if not by Christmas by New Year’s at the latest, and what better gift for a writer than some brilliant and inspiring advice to usher in the new year and all those resolutions with? :)

I know that some authors find rewriting easier (in some ways) than the initial creative process. Me, I can whip something out of nothing without breaking a sweat. But whenever I try to approach the highly necessary rewrite of my recent novella, I get almost immediately overwhelmed by the minutiae of things that need tending to. I am pulled this way and that, trying to keep track of the myriad of details that need to hover simultaneously in my forebrain–and I end up just fiddling with the niggling little grammar nits, polishing word choice, questioning whether that adverb is really necessary, and reassuring myself that all the independent clauses are safely sequestered within their parenthetical commas.

Consequently, the real work–that is, deleting scenes and rewriting the whole cloth of large sections–goes undone because of these distractions of questionable value. Sometimes, I think I might be better off deleting the damned thing and starting over from scratch.

So, my question: In your subsequent drafts, how do you keep the story from getting in the way of your rewriting?

Answer behind the cut.

I know writers who do, in fact, just start their second draft from scratch. I don’t personally, but sometimes I can see the appeal. I also am not one of those writers who finds the revision process vastly more rewarding than the initial writing process, although I do like the end result of all that flipping work. But the actual revision work is exhausting, because I’m trying to hold three different versions of the story in my head at once: the story as it was, the story as it is in process of being revised, and the story as it needs to be.

From the lead-in to the question, it sounds like it’s the second stage where it’s falling apart for the writer, which makes sense to me, because it’s the second part *I* find really headache-inducing. Knowing what you have to do, knowing what the story should look like on the other end, is a hell of a lot easier than figuring out how to do it. And I hate to say it, but on some level, it’s just a matter of practice. It’s also a hell of a lot easier if a third party (like an editor) has said, “This is a part that doesn’t work. Make it work,” or, “I need to see some motivation for this action,” or “I need more sense of setting here,” because that gives me something to work off of.

Okay. *rubs brain* This is hard to think about, actually, or at least hard to explain, because so much of it for me is just grim damned determination to get it done. But one thing I do is start with a hard copy. I _have_ to start with a hard copy. If I just try to work on screen my brain dribbles out my ear and I lose all will to live. More importantly, my brain is extremely consistent: if I start doing revisions on screen, what happens is I think, “Oh! This is a place to insert a clever line!” and I revise to insert it, then discover that a page and a half later, I already had that clever line in place. Hard copy prevents me from doing that, and believe me, after about the fifteenth time *of* doing it, I’m very happy to have read the bloody book all the way through and made myself aware of where my brain is likely to come up with clevernesses that it has already come up with. :)

Having a hard copy also means I can physically strike sections out, even if all I leave myself with beyond that is a note in big letters saying “MAKE THIS MORE BETTER” (which, yes, is usually exactly what I write). It is, one way or another, a visual cue that this part needs *work*.

I usually start at the beginning of the story, but I don’t think there’s any compelling reason to do it that way. Another advantage of hard copy for me is that when I’m further into the book and I’ve found something that needs setup earlier on, I can go back and leave myself a note on the paper that says “Joanne’s facing Wile E. Coyote on page 235, there needs to be some kind of foreshadowing *here*, in this scene where I can stuff in a Looney Toons reference without it being too gratuitous.” Then when I get to that in the on-screen revisions I can go “oh yeah” and take care of it immediately instead of having to flip back and forth.

Trust yourself–and when I say ‘trust yourself’, I also mean ‘forbid yourself to nitpick’–on the sentence structure level, by and large. There will, yes, be times and places where the sentences need work, but put that into a different mental space. That’s copy-editing, not revising. It comes *after* revisions.

I will very frequently cut and paste the sections that need work out of the manuscript. So if I need to strike seven pages out of chapter three and just rewrite them wholesale, I’ll take a version of chapter 3, save it into the Second Draft folder, and then delete everything that needs to go in one big chunk. It’s completely psychological for me: somehow it’s less awful to gut chapter three by itself than it is to take it out of the manuscript and watch the whole page count of the manuscript collapse by eight pages. It also gives me a place (or usually more than one) where the original version of the chapter or scene is saved, so if I need to go back and rescue a sentence, I can snag it out of the original.

I use a lot of white space when I’m working on screen. If I’m working on a specific part of a scene and I know there’s still shitloads to do further down, I just hit carriage return until I can’t see the later material. Again, it’s pure psychology. It’s a matter of being able to *face* one page of revisions at a time, but having new text that needs work continually scrolling up to face me is just disenheartening.

Focus on one major problem/storyline/thread/whatever at a time. This year an editor asked me to do a major revision on a book. M.A.J.O.R. revision. What ended up happening was I rewrote the first half of the book heavily and the second half less so, and then in the second round of revisions, ended up rewriting the second half of the book heavily. I *knew*, when I submitted it the second time, that there were still problems facing the manuscript, but I had just run out of steam. I needed someone else’s feedback to say “these are the things that can be punched up”. Basically what I did was face one set of problems the first time through, and an almost completely different set the second time around (they had been touched on in the first revision, but it was sort of an emotional storyline revision vs an action storyline revision, and I didn’t have the mental capacity to manage both at once to the degree they both needed work).

All right. If I have any more thoughts I’ll add them later, but right now this is all I can come up with. I hope it’s at least of a little use.

Seattle’s a great place to live…if it weren’t for the undead.

No one’s getting out of there alive.

To go along with WALKING DEAD’s release, my web guru, Laura Denson, recently did a recording of “Rabbit Tricks”, the Walker Papers short story that fits chronologically between COYOTE DREAMS and WALKING DEAD.

My longtime friend and writing partner Sarah Palmero did a two-minute voice recording from THE QUEEN’S BASTARD. I think both of these are pretty damned cool (if utterly bizarre, because wow, really weird to hear someone else reading my words!), and would like to thank them both profusely for doing these and letting me post them publicly!

Fifth, I’m terribly smug to show off the (tiny–if you want to see it full sized you’ll have to buy the story) cover for “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight”, which was painted by manga artist Lanny Liu.

Along those same lines, “Hot Time” has debuted amongst its patrons today. (I wasn’t thinking, when I changed its due date to September 1st, that that was also the release date for WALKING DEAD. Oh well, everybody got WD early anyway, so “Hot Time” still gets to be a little bit special.) For those who didn’t join the fundable commission the first time through, the novella will be available to purchase in February 2010, after which it’ll go off the market permanently until it finds a traditional publisher.

And I just noticed several of my books have been nominated as contenders for 101 Best Fantasy novels. I have to admit that given some of the company (which ranges from Lloyd Alexander to Diana Wynne Jones with all points between), I feel my presence there is a bit ludicrous, but also quite wonderful and I wouldn’t mind making it onto somebody’s top 100 list, so if you wanted, you could go vote. :) And my thanks to whomever nominated me, how cool of you. :)

Several people have emailed to ask when the next Walker Papers will be out. I’m delighted to let you know that book four, WALKING DEAD, will be out in September 2009.

It is, in fact, going to be a busy year for releases. This is what this year’s publication schedule looks like:

March: A FANTASY MEDLEY (anthology featuring a story of the Old Races)

May: THE PRETENDER’S CROWN (book two of the Inheritors’ Cycle)

June: mass market paperback re-releases of URBAN SHAMAN, THUNDERBIRD FALLS, & COYOTE DREAMS (books 1-3 of the Walker Papers)

September: WALKING DEAD (book four of the Walker Papers)

October: mass market paperback re-release of WINTER MOON (anthology featuring “Banshee Cries”, a Walker Papers novella); also, THE PHANTOM QUEEN AWAKES, a mass market anthology with an original short story about the Morrigan

November: TAKE A CHANCE graphic novel, compiling issues 1-5 of TAKE A CHANCE, my new superhero comic currently being released as monthly issues

Frankly, I’m exhausted. :)

It’s high time, too, that I showed off the cover for THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, and along with it, a teaser excerpt from the book. The scene is from chapter one, and Belinda has been summoned to discuss recent political developments with her mother the queen…
Read the teaser!

In “Zen and the Art of Vampirism,” Zoe Takano, the only vampire in Toronto, a city filled with supernatural creatures of Kelley Armstrong’s Otherworld, finds her place in the hierarchy threatened by two interlopers.

“Riding the Shore of the River of Death” returns us to the world of Kate Elliott’s Crown of Stars. Kareka, daughter of the begh of the Kirshat, hunts to take a man’s head. It is her last opportunity to prove herself as a man or else she will find herself restricted to the role of woman and wife in the clan forever.

Robin Hobb revisits her Farseer world in “Words Like Coins.” Mirrifen, a failed hedge-witch’s apprentice who has married to find security finds that threatened by a severe drought and the appearance of a pregnant female pecksie.

C.E. Murphy takes us to frozen Moscow in “From Russia, with Love.” Baba Yaga’s daughter is a barmaid at a dive when Janx and Eliseo Daisani walk in. They discover, as they compete for the girl’s affections, that Baba Yaga has plans for Janx and that her beautiful daughter had merely been the bait.

Limited: 200 numbered copies signed by the authors and editor
Trade: 3000 fully clothbound hardcover edition

Supplies are quite literally limited, so pre-order it now!