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June 22, 2006
Stick a Fork in it, UMBRA's Done!
It weighs in at a bouncing 119,300 words, and has taken me, as far as I can tell, most of a year, but it appears to me that as of this evening, having written THE END at the end of an awful lot of text, my novel UMBRA is finally finished.
Of course, there are bits and pieces in the MS that need fixing up, and research things to put in to those places where currently I have these little placeholder bits, and I need to see if all the new material I've added to what was there before I embarked on all this revision/rewriting/etc still fits together all right, but in all important respects, yep, it's finished!
I will now go and flop on the couch and watch soccer. Oh, and maybe get something to eat. Gadzooks, but I'm tired!
Posted by adrian at 08:11 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 16, 2006
If I Was Any Closer, I'd Be Done
Today I banged the flippers at the keyboard and managed a very surprising 2600 words. I say "surprising" because it just kept going, like it was writing itself. Which of course is what you want; it's just that it's been a long time since the scribbling has gone quite this well in a single day. In the course of today's session things got incredibly intense, painful and wonderfully disturbing for Our Synthetic Hero, easily the most intense passages in the whole book. When I was done I stopped and had to catch my breath. Phwoar! Manuscript now stands at 113,000 words, and all things being equal it should be finished inside 115K.
All of which is good, because today Publisher Brian wrote to ask, in part, how soon he could see the book, and strongly hinted that having it done by next Tuesday (!) would be good. I don't know about Tuesday, but who knows? I think it might need all of next week, even if I actually finish writing the MS by Tuesday. The whole thing will need re-reading, and further patching and spackling, and filling in any missing research details.
Still, so close! Soon, it will be over, really over, and I can celebrate properly! Yay!
Now to settle back, enjoy the weekend, and build up some energy so I can sit up really late on Sunday night to watch the Socceroos battle Brazil. Yikes!
Posted by adrian at 09:18 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 15, 2006
KAB-MIA
This is me last night, modelling a fabulous "toque" (beanie) and fingerless gloves made for me by Treefen. It was pretty cold then, but it's going to be even colder tonight. Rumours persist of an overnight low of just 3 measly degrees Celsius.
Also note in this pic: that's my new book I'm pointing at, UMBRA. It's currently up to 110,000 words, and the new improved ending is coming along slowly. A few days ago I had to chop out all of the old ending, which was about 5000 words. Even though I knew that material was crap, it felt like a major blow when I cut it. I was moping about for days afterwards.
As it happens, I've been doing a lot of moping lately, feeling subpar, glum and at times bitterly unhappy. And, as always, for no really good reason, other than the usual neurochemical whackiness in my stupid brain. It makes for lousy book progress, and at such times I generally feel like it also makes lousy blog fodder. "Hmm, I'm depressed today. Well, it feels bad. It feels like when you wake up and you have to walk to school, and it's just raining and pouring and cold--and it's the 100th straight day it's been like this, with no end in sight." Imagine that, and that's what it's like in my head a lot of the time.
On the other hand, at least I'm not getting headaches like I used to. I might actually be in an actual "post-headache" phase of life now. This appears largely to do with a migraine prevention drug one of my doctors put me on called Sandomigran. I take a whole bunch of this stuff each night. It makes me a bit sleepy, but it appears to short-circuit a lot of the headache nonsense. Often I can feel the usual "pre-headache" build-up starting to occur--but then nothing comes of it and I wind up a few hours later sitting around wondering where the stupid headache I was supposed to get got off to.
One thing that did cheer me up no end was last Monday night, watching the World Cup coverage on SBS. The World Cup is a soccer tournament. You may have heard something about it lately. I gather it's quite popular. On Monday night the Australian Socceroos played Japan's national team. And, after a very worryingly long time in which the Japanese team had one (very dubious) goal on us, the Socceroos struck back with three goals within the final fifteen minutes of the match. It was a breathtaking thing to witness. I felt all overcome. Australia hasn't had a team in the World Cup finals since 1974, and on that occasion we got bundled out immediately, scoreless. Now we're at the top of our group, and in line to face the Brazilian team on Sunday night. I'll be sitting up in the middle of the night, watching, and no one will be more surprised by this than me. I never used to be interested in sports like this, but I must say this soccer/football thing is growing on me.
Last, I mentioned recently that I was involved in a live three-way radio thing for DragonPage. It was lots of fun--even if, because of scheduling hassles it was in the tiny wee hours of the night for me--and now the hosts of the show have produced a downloadable podcast of the event. Get thee hence here to read more about it, and to download the file (fair warning: it's a big file, and may take a while to download on a slow connection).
Posted by adrian at 07:14 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack