I’m still knee-deep in reading submissions for Entangled, trying to get back into the editorial mindset of “scan-for-brilliance.”  I know the skill set’s intact, it’s just taking a while to reclaim.  Two projects that were almost-but-not-quite, and one that’s probably-not-sorry.  This is the brutal part of the editorial job, and the one that many people sneer at, but my job here is to find the best stories I think will sell the best, not to make allowances or be gentle.  :-(

Meanwhile, I’m working on the on-spec manuscript, and juggling my two long-term freelance clients, and going through the final stages of production for PROMISES TO KEEP for the kickstarter release.

So yeah… if I’ve been quiet lately, all that would be why.

I still haven’t seen either Iron Man #3 or the new Trek, mainly because I’m a social movie-going creature and nobody’s schedule seems to be syncing up with mine.  *sighs*  But soon.

Coming up:  BEA and the related chaos thereof, and then a brief pause before I’m into the whirlwind of HEART OF BRIAR’s release, and the related book-pimping.  The sightings-and-signings page has been updated, and will continue to be updated on a probably-weekly basis… (so if you have a bookstore or book festival you think I should swing by, let me know!)

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But when you work at home, alone, you can go a little batshit after a while, looking at the same four walls (even when you picked the artwork and colors out yourself).

Some days I go to a co-working space, and let the noise of other people rush over me. There’s good coffee there, too, and industrial-strength wifi, and it’s near Chinatown so lunch is never a problem. *g* But sometimes I need a different view. Fresh air. No wifi.

Yep, that’s in New York City.  Really.  We’ve got a LOT of parkland: some of it groomed, some of it not, some of it famous, some of it known only to the locals.  Some of it even has wifi (hello Bryant Park I love you).

And when you’re working there, you can hang out with squirrels (both black and grey), blue jays and robins, fearless sparrows, the occasional possum or a falcon, and a paradox.  Er, a pair of ducks.

Yeah, we’re not all about skyscrapers.  Although we’ve got those too.

All photos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 

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And this struck me as strange (then again, I don’t create playlists for projects, either.  So I may be an outlier.)

Y’see, I don’t ‘cast’ my books before/while I’m writing them – or even after, honestly*.  It’s not because it wouldn’t be fun, or because I don’t think about what my characters look like… it’s just that I have to wait until they tell me what they look like.

Most of my characters ‘appear’ first as voices – their dialogue is the first introduction I get to them, and  only after I’ve been listening to them for a few pages do I  get an idea of what they look like, beyond nationality and gender.  Hell, sometimes I don’t even know their nationality until they’ve been nattering for a while.

So yeah, even after the fact, I’m hard-pressed to say “oh, so-and-so would be perfect to play X” because X is – in my mind – their own distinct person.

(I steal individual traits like a magpie, though, as many random strangers and close friends can attest.)

The current project, however, seems to want to do everything differently. This project wants visuals, even of places where I’ve been or things I know well enough to have in my head already.  And Story really wants to know what the characters look like, before we start writing them. I’m not sure why, but hey, what Story wants, generally, Story gets.

(this is generally a good rule of thumb, except when it’s not.  But that’s another post entirely)

So I’ve been going through my various fandoms, watching old movies with a different eye, and generally trawling the Internet for faces.  And in the process of finding I’ve discovered something interesting about myself: I am acutely uncomfortable browsing the internet looking specifically for a physical type, and even more uncomfortable narrowing down through an actor/actress/model’s portfolio for the very specific shot I need. It feels… stalkerish. Invasive. A little creepy.

Clearly, I would never have made it as a casting director.

Or maybe I would, because one  suggestion was rejected because the actor in question couldn’t IMO handle the role.  Physically ideal, but…no.

I suspect that if writers were able to make casting decisions, we’d see fewer “pretty” faces on the screen, and a lot more interesting ones…

Writers, what say ye?  Readers, do you “cast” while you read?  Do you ever find yourself disagreeing with the author’s description in your head?

(and, if you’ve read the Retrievers series, did the idea of a heroine whom nobody could remember long enough to describe drive you batshit?  Because it apparently drove my copyeditors. Up. The. Wall.  *heee*)

* there are three exceptions to this.  1) Sergei was always written with Mitch Pileggi in mind.  2) Danny Hendrickson is – and this was pointed out after the fact – based on Tim Hutton. 3) I may have given some serious through as to who would do the voice for Madame, should H’wood ever come knocking….

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It is entirely possible that I haven’t loved a book this much since writing STAYING DEAD.

(my feelings for THE VINEART WAR were more akin to your first Bad News relationship, where you know you gotta even though everyone’s shaking their heads sadly at you. Less fun, more obsession. Although there’s some of that obsession coming through in this book too. So I may be screwed. In a “regret nothing” sort of way…. ).

And no, this has no pub date, because I’m writing it on spec (as I did with FLESH AND FIRE), and even my agent hasn’t seen more than the early proposal/sample pages yet. I want to have at least 30k before I drop it on him….

Editing:

First week on the job for Entangled, and I’ve already got three manuscripts on my desk (two for evaluation, one for an edit. I am both filled with glee and thinking whatthefuckwereyouthinking? So: pretty much normal and as expected. :-)

Social:

A break in the rain yesterday, and I got to squire some friends visiting from Ireland around the High Line and the West Village. I’d thought about taking them over to the Greenway and the Frying Pan for drinks, after, but decided not wearing them into the ground was a better plan….

and they gave me this!

Tomorrow, I get to hit the local crafts fair, and Mother’s Day Brunch (which is also my mom’s Birthday Brunch), so I’m hoping there’s another break in the rain.  But for now, I should hunker down and get to the writing and the editing (and the cleaning of the bathroom, just so you don’t think my life is so terribly glam…)

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So, this is very cool, simply for what it is.  But it’s also neat to look at the difference in stance-choices, and what they say about each interpretation of the same character, both from a timeframe perspective, and the actor himself.

Personally, the only one I ‘believe’ is shooting, rather than posing, is Craig.  His stance, and the leashed violence in his movement, sells it for me. How about you? And what does the choice of movement tell you?

(and yes, as was pointed out on Tumblr, Roger Moore is the only Bond whose gun does not actually fire)

image source: http://jtammanyhall.tumblr.com/post/35805505134/all-the-bonds

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Or, y’know, let ‘em fly into a more appreciative space.  Like a fellow writer’s in-box or chat room.

Because there is, when going through copyedits, an instinct to pull out the STET macro and go to town.  ”Leave my story alone!”  No matter how skillful the CE, and how perfectly right they may be – this is our baby and the CE is telling us we done did it wrong.

(an editor gets a milder version of this reaction, mainly because the editor has, ideally, already won tolerance by dint of long partnership, and the fact that they’re paying you money for your words. The copyeditor is a stranger coming in and telling you that even with three passes and an editorial revision, you still got it wrong.)

And, alas, not all copyeditors are good.  Some, in fact, are a bit not good. If you scratch any writer’s skin, be it thick or thin, you will find copyeditor horror stories. Some of them, admittedly, more horrific/horrifying than others (changing actual chunks of the manuscript, including the rewrite of  ”after dinner drinks” to “post-prandial brandies,” happened to a writer I know. Two decades later, that story still makes us cringe). And these days, we’re given even less time to go over a copyedit than previous – when I started, there was a two-week expectation.  Now we’re being asked to turn them around in seven days (sometimes less). So you’re being traumatized and told to do it at a forced march.

So yeah.  There’s stress, and defensive posturing, and all that.

Now, let me say that the copyeditor for HEART OF BRIAR and SOUL OF FIRE has been wonderful (so much so that I specifically requested she do the second book).  She’s saved my bacon on a number of occasions, from grammatical pickiness to reminding me that I’d changed the timing on a scene so no, there wouldn’t be sunlight coming through the window (ooops).  And I am aware that for copyeditors, literal-mindedness and pedantry are tools of the trade, not drawbacks.

So mostly I mutter to myself (or anyone in the war room with me), choose the hills I’m willing to die on, and let the Wookie win, 80% of the time.

But there are times when I have to stop an think “no, wait, what?  

Today’s straw was a query of “so does X say this?  I thought it was A or B, so this needs a tag”  when the very NEXT line after the sentence was “they both turned to look at X, surprised that he’d finally spoken….”

Yeah, no, I’m sorry.  STET.

But I let her have her way with my commas.

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1. get bike tuned up and wheel repaired (yeah, I haven’t gotten that done yet)
2. start the copyedit for SOUL OF FIRE (due Wednesday)
3. polish up the next segment of an ongoing freelance project (due Tuesday)
4. edit two stories for Buzzy Magazine
5. finish editing a client manuscript
6. write the next chapter of DOGHOUSE (G&T #3)
7. clean the damned apartment (it’s not too bad, but could use a dust-and-vac)
8. keep working on the on-spec manuscript as I find time.
9. update the website with new links and news
10. go to a birthday party and not zone out from lack of sleep….

Yeah, okay, I can do that. Right?  And also find some time to get outside and suck some fresh air into my lungs….

I’ve done the 9-6 office job thing, and I’ve done the fluctuating-shifts retail thing, and this suits me better.  But yeah, I miss the surety of  actual non-working weekends sometimes…

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My answer: a story.

No, they said, what kind of story?

With words, and characters, and Stuff Happening and their world changing, even if The World doesn’t change for them.

But what genre? they insisted. Is it fantasy? SF? YA? Mainstream? Is it Steampunk or UF? What is it?

I don’t know. Or yeah, I kind of know, because there’s magic and there’s adventure, and there’s growing up and there’s dying and there’s love and faith and the loss of same, and guns and horses and snark and drama…

But I don’t know what kind of story it is. Agent Guy and I have discussed this, and come to no real conclusion except: it’s the story I need to write right now. And when it’s done, then we’ll worry about it.

Because yeah, I’m immersed in the business side of things, as much as I can bear.  I know that to keep going, I have to hit the market, keep up sales, find new readers without losing too many of the old, all that.

But there are times when thinking too much about the business of writing – the marketing and the promotion, stressing about the tropes and the memes and the audience expectations – gets in the way of the simple stillness of telling.

So yeah, when this is done, we’ll figure out what it is, what I’ve done.  Right now, I can’t think about all that.  I’m writing.

What do you think: smart brain-management, crazy as a fox survival tactic, or writerly denial?

cross posted to Book View Cafe

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When someone from the local animal shelter approaches her about finding  grant funds that have gone missing, Ginny Mallard convinces her bartender friend Teddy Tonica to help her investigate once again.

They soon discover that something is disturbing the animals at the shelter at night…and then a dead body shows up.

With the help of Ginny’s Shar-Pei puppy  and Tonica’s tabby cat, this unconventional crime-solving team has to figure out what’s going on before the shelter – and more people – lose everything….

on-sale October 2013.  

Available for pre-order NOW

Amazon

B&N

Find FIXED At Your Local Independent BookStore

Some of you may have noticed a change from the first cover:

Basically, editorial and sales listened to the feedback they were getting (yeah, I know, crazy but it DOES happen) and said “yeah, you’re right, these books aren’t cute, they’ve got more of an edge, and we’re sorry about that Portland/Seattle screw-up in the copy of the first book, so…. we think this fits the series better.”  And I quite agree.  :-)

(I still have my gripes, of course, because we mystery folk are perfectionist on the details. Who can identify what’s itching me about this otherwise lovely cover?)

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Working on [project name redacted] yesterday, I took a Tumblr break to rest my brain, and was handed the visual* that will be [character name redacted] for my entire damned life. BOOM.  In that instant – seeing what that character was going through, and how it refracted through the lens of what I’d been working on – I understood things about my character I hadn’t realized I knew until then.

(via http://ki11-the-n0ise.tumblr.com/)

So, y’see, it’s all work-related.  Eventually.  Everything goes into the brain and gets crunched and comes out as Story.  We can’t help it.

*an unusual moment for that character on that show.  So it was in the back of my head but more dormant than not.

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