Flu

My muse is a diva. Laid up with the flu these past days I would have had all the time in the world to write, but no: “Ewwww, body fluids leaking everywhere.” — “I want an unfoggy brain.” Whine, whine. “I can’t be creative with all those drugs.” She never complains when it’s wine instead of Ibuprofen and Cold FX. Bitch!

And today, feeling a bit more like myself, at least good enough to go and teach my Sunday workshop, AND DON”T HAVE TIME! Voilà, she’s all bright and sunny and wanting to write chapter 2, inundating me with lines and images and making my fingers itch. Did I mention, bitch?

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“Free Falling”

With that I finally have a title that ties in (pardon the pun) with the overall theme of ‘ties’ and the dichotomy of holding safe (protection/security) and holding captive (confinement/restriction) they imply. All that before the background of Skanian society and their belief in knots and braided lives and social safety nets.

Other than that I’ve been researching police training, deciding on names for secondary characters and generally fleshing out the plot line; I put together a desktop for the new book and am working on the playlist. So, a bit of disjointed dickering everywhere, but not an unproductive day.  I like it when I can feel the haze take shape and coalesce, when plot is motivated by characters, I can see the theme running through everything and get an idea of the mood of the piece.

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Tools of the Trade

[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/gb_gordon/status/189883233020821504″]

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Some Ms are more equal than others?

Reviewing cisM/cisM books exclusively, because that’s what gets you off is your prerogative. Nothing wrong with that in my book. But postulating that that is the only ‘pure’ M/M genre out there and that any romance novel involving transmen should be labeled as trans and not as gay is wrought with all kinds of innuendo and betrays a mindset that’s either woefully uninformed, or ignorant, or malicious. When did trans* and gay start to stand in opposition to each other or become mutually exclusive? When I blinked?

The post that started the latest kerfuffle over at Chicks & Dicks was, at best and with the benefit of the doubt, an extremely thoughtless use of language. It might still have been saved by just acknowledging the kink and apologizing for not thinking things through. Alas, it’s an art to know when to stop digging.

Would everyone please engage brain (and heart!) before keyboard?

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Research

I still don’t have a solid second case for the boys to work, though I do have an idea that’s slowly starting to coalesce. I’m reading up on what makes and motivates serial killers, and that’s making me decidedly queasy. Theirs are not really heads I want to get into. Not really. Really not.

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Movie: John Carter

A cheesy, pulpy, swashbuckling, tongue-in-cheek romp. Very Frazetta in style. Bit uneven in plot and pacing, but really good popcorn fun. I enjoyed it.

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It’s gone

All edits are finished, and I just submitted the manuscript! For the time being, it’s out of my hands, if not nearly out of my head. Still feeling more deflated than elated, especially since any news will be preceded by weeks of nail biting.

Keep your fingers crossed for me?

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2nd edit done

I feel a bit deflated, as if someone let the air out. Printed the whole manuscript again, so I can do a final read-through on paper to check for consistency. After I’m done and the novel is submitted, I might take a day off, do nothing and then aimlessly poke around for a new goal in life. And, yeah, attack the Mt. Everest of stuff that fell by the wayside while I was busy writing. What? Creativity demands sacrifices. You have to know how to pick your battles.

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Edit Monday

Got chapters 11 and 12 back from second beta reader over the weekend, so I know what I’ll be doing today. Edit it in and poke the third beta. 😉

Getting very close to the end of the second edit run, here. I can almost smell the finish line. Which means, I should probably keep next week fairly distraction free, so that I can do the last manuscript read, make sure all spelling and capitalization of invented words is consistent, find all left-over typos (I wish) and check that the layout’s uniform throughout the text.

 

ETA: Poke wasn’t needed. 2nd edit for 11 and 12 now complete. Holding breath for 13.

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Idle musings

If you ask me who or what I consider myself to be, I might answer things like writer, photographer, cook. You know, all those organically creative things that run (or that I at least run) at human speed. The word computer geek would not be at the forefront of my mind. And then there comes a day when I catch myself editing on my trusted linux box with one beta review on the Windows laptop to my right and another on the iPad to my left, quickly dashing off a question on Twitter, and that image I have of myself gets all screwed up.

Hell I’m one of those peeps who were still adamant about not being able to write creatively with anything but a pen in my hands when LJ hit one million users (remember LJ?). Now I feel really weird with anything but a keyboard under my fingers, fixed or portable (still hate typing on the iPad, btw).

Conveniences have a way of trickling in under the radar and changing the way we look at things. I’m the last person on earth to want go back to the stone age (I’m way too lazy for that), but just to, dunno, lean back, look at the way things are, acknowledge them and how they change your look on life, and make them a conscious decision (or not), rather than be run by them unawares.

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