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April 28, 2006
8 Chapters in, UMBRA Fails to Suck--Author Gobsmacked
Today I read up to the end of Chapter 8 of the dreaded tome, and found I was only making very minor corrections to the text--a line here, a punchier bit of dialogue there, cool bit of foreshadowing over that way--and that, at various points, it was actually bloody gripping! I'm sitting here, reading along, thinking, PHWOAR! If the rest of this thing shapes up the same way, I might actually have something here.
Of coure, I'm still prepared for the final three or four chapters to be redone from scratch. There's a thing that happens to Our Synthetic Hero at about that point which makes his progress during the final chapters extremely difficult, more even than I'm comfortable with, so I need to fix that, and that means everything that follows has to be redone as well. I'll be fine. If I only need to redo those last chapters, rather than the whole beast, I'll be greatly relieved.
Posted by adrian at 06:33 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
April 27, 2006
Reports of my Death
Not dead, but not all that great, either, it must be said. I've been muddling along since you last heard from me, coughing a lot, feeling wheezy and generally "blurrgh", and intermittently quite depressed depending on how I feel about the whole writing caper at any given moment. Right now I feel fairly okay about it, so that's one thing less to worry about.
(Actually, what's been really weird about this flu: during the first 10 days or so of it, I had NO HEADACHES. Since then I've had only one serious headache and it lasted only one day. I've never heard of 'flu-sensitive tension headaches, that clear off once you come down with a cold and start to come back once the infection has run its miserable course, but who knows? Though I do know if I was a patient on HOUSE, I'd have been diagnosed and treated for five different horrible illnesses I didn't actually have, succumbed to either respiratory failure or terrible convulsive seizures, nearly died from all kinds of other related problems, including the meds given me for all the things I didn't actually have, only to be saved (maybe) in the final act with a correct diagnosis. It's a great show, but I'd so hate to be one of those patients.)
I've started re-reading the UMBRA manuscript. So far, at about chapter 4, while it has required surgery and graftings of fresh material here and there, it's holding up well. Surprisingly well, in fact. I suspect later chapters will require more extensive work, but for now I'm feeling okay about the whole thing--which doesn't sound like much, but is a huge improvement on how I was feeling about it not that long ago.
Some news, of a vague and wispy sort, came up today in a note from Publisher Brian, who tells me that "things" regarding "Project Mimosa" continue to bubble along nicely. As always I have very few details to share. All I can say at the moment is that there appears still to be considerable interest from the other party's end, and there will apparently be a series of meetings for Brian, Michelle and me to go to once we hit LA in August. Crikey! I will know more about all this in a month or so, I think. Whether I can report any of it, of course, is another matter. This makes it very frustrating, but might well be worth it in the end. At the very least, even if Project Mimosa falls completely flat, it will make for a fun story. It's not every day something like this happens to a doofus like me.
Last: it was my 43rd birthday just recently. I am increasingly feeble and pathetic. To comfort me in my dotage, Michelle arranged for our broadband speed to be doubled (without it costing anything extra--w00t!), and provided me with numerous other fabulous treats, including a set of Season Two DVDs of INSPECTOR REX, and a copy of bizarre-but-fabulous PS2 game, WE LOVE KATAMARI, which I'm really enjoying, and looking forward to rolling ever bigger things into ever huger balls of stuff. There's something bizarrely satisfied about rolling up birds, dogs, cats and even small children, which continue to wave and squawk as you continue rolling other things up. Or maybe that's just the 'flu talking.
Posted by adrian at 07:47 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 11, 2006
Little Known Author In Shock Pre-Birthday Lurgy Misery
Errrgh. It would appear that tomorrow, the 12th, is my 43rd birthday. To celebrate the great event, my body is shouting me to an all-expenses paid exclusive visit to the Land of Blagghgh, in which, on one hand, I don't sleep at night, while at the same time producing industrial quantities of green gunk that I'm sure will one day prove either to contain previously unknown medical benefits, or be useful in the aerospace industry as a solvent.
So I'll be out of it for a wee while. Right now I'm got the liveliness of a blown 5-watt bulb. All I want to do is go to sleep, but if I do that I'll have another night like last night, during which I got 90 minutes of sleep, and hours and hours of nasty sore throat and bumper fun mucus production, and all the tossing and turning I could stand.
You know what really sucked last night? Eagle-eyed scrutiny of the TV guide showed that Channel 9 was going to start showing episodes of Farscape (a favourite sf show of mine) at the horrific hour of 2am. All the same, I fell asleep at 1:30am--and then woke up again at 3am. Thus completely missing the show. I lacked the energy to say, "Bugger."
Errrgh. Errrgh, I say.
UP-[COUGH]-DATE [HACK] 15/4:
Since I shared all this with you, I've turned 43, and the lurgy is quite a bit worse.
The birthday was, on one hand, lovely; on the other hand it was also terribly depressing, and I'm not sure why. It just was. Weird. In any case, since then I have been spending lots of time coughing, hacking, gasping, feeling like wilted lettuce, and lacking energy for pretty much everything. One thing I have enjoyed: no more cough syrup! At least in this country, doctors no longer prescribe cough syrup, and will tell you the stuff is no good, and does not help. Yay! I always hated the vile crap when I was younger; it was often worse than the actual lurgy, imho. Michelle chimes in here to remind me of the atom bomb of cough syrups: this stuff called "seneca and ammonia". It tasted like something you'd use to clean your toilet, particularly if your toilet was seriously backed up and overflowing.
As for the birthday: David Shanahan in comments mentioned my good fortune to have a birthday on "Yuri's Day", ie the anniversary of the occasion of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, going for his brief suborbital flight in 1961. I have always, being a space geek, treasured that coincidence. When the first US space shuttle launch (finally) happened on April 12, 1981 (my 18th birthday) I was chuffed out of all proportion and spent far too much time standing out in the backyard, very cold, staring upward, hoping to spot Columbia orbiting overhead. The local news said it was coming our way, and to watch in a particular direction. I never saw it. It was a tremendously exciting moment, at least for me.
Posted by adrian at 07:29 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack
April 06, 2006
HYDROGEN STEEL--The Cover
This, folks, is the cover for my next book, HYDROGEN STEEL, courtesy of noted illustrator Mark Evans. I think it looks damn spiffy, even if I do say so myself. Publisher Brian surprised me with this earlier this week. I'd been nagging him for some months about the need to get a cover going for the new book, but had heard nothing in return, until he just casually mentions, "oh by the way, the HS cover is in the bag", and sent it over.
Well bugger me with a brick! This is amazing! The Edge website is now listing it in their forthcoming books area, and you might just be able to pre-order it.
UPDATE 15/4:
I've learned today, via Taleswapper, that the cover image Edge has organised for HYDROGEN STEEL very likely was not commissioned specifically for my book. At first I was a bit disappointed--but then I thought back to Ye Olden Days, in the 70s, when I was a teenager, and first reading sf. A great many sf books in those days, particularly the ones from British publishers, featured covers by the likes of legendary cover artist Chris Foss (my favourite), for example. Those same illustrations also served as cover art for genre magazines of the time, or interior art. There was one mag, I think with a dull title like Science Fiction Monthly (no decent link available), which featured one of these spectacular (yet vague and often a bit surreal) paintings as a huge centrefold each issue. At one point, around '79-81 or so, I covered the walls of my bedroom in a vast frieze of these centrefolds. It was glorious, being surrounded by such imagery. (My parents despaired of how there were going to fix all the drawing pin holes in the wall plaster, but that's another story.)
In other words: I'm none too bothered about the HYDROGEN STEEL cover image not exactly being commissioned just for my book. It's still a great image, and does indeed go with the book's thematic issues.
Posted by adrian at 03:58 PM | Comments (13) | TrackBack