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The marathon begins. Again.
Apr. 27th, 2006 10:57 amSo, having survived the trip to Birmingham, the time has come, finally, to face down the 691 ms. pages of Daughter of Hounds. Counting today and the day the ms. absolutely has to be back with my editor in NYC, I have a mere 19 days to do a read-through, consider her suggestions for revisions, make whatever revisions must be made, and get the thing out of here. Fortunately, I'm being allowed to submit the ms. electronically (ah, the future) or my eema would be toast. No way I'd be able to do this in, oh, say, ten days. So, yes, the marathon begins. For the next two weeks and five days, Spooky and I will being doing precious little that isn't directly related to getting this ms. ready for my editor (who's name is Liz, by the way). To that end, I shall be doing something I've never done before and swore I would never do. I shall be employing the Zokutou Word Meter. I've always looked askance at those things, as I cannot imagine how one knows the length of most fictions until they're finished, but it may serve me in this effort, since I do know the precise length of the present draft (shown below in pp., which I guess makes this my Zokutou Page Meter). A visual aid of my progress during this crunch might be useful. We'll see. I'll start one now, to track our progress through the ms., the read-through, and then when I begin the revisions, I'll restart it (or start a second one, to be more exact). This morning, it looks like this:
Isn't that frelling encouraging? I'm hoping we'll finish the read-through on May 6th. That's assuming we get through the prologue today (over 10K words) and then do one chapter a day with no lost days. It's a daunting schedule. The last time I can recall being so under the gun was the novel I ghosted back in '97, which was written, start to finish, in about three months. Today, I'm printing a clean copy of the whole ms., since the first draft is so marked up that many pages are illegible, hidden behind my red scribble. But I also need to read all the way through "Highway 97," tweak it however much it needs to be tweaked, and write a little intro for it. So, yeah, that's what I'll be doing today.
We stopped by my storage unit in Birmingham yesterday. I've had tons of stuff stored since we left Liberty House (the first time) in August 2001, and every now and then I stop by and rescue something. It may interest you to know that the storage facility is in the Harris Warehouse and Transfer Building, on the third floor, as featured in "The Long Hall on the Top Floor." The story was written before I even knew the building was being used for private storage. Oh, serendipity! Anyway, I found my copy of The Chocolate Alphabet, a wonderful little black-and-white comic Harlan did with Larry Todd. It was published in 1978, and I'd feared my copy was lost. But I discovered it yesterday, hidden in a box of notebooks from college.
Decent enough sleep last night, despite the nightmares. I saw my pusher...er, doctor yesterday, and she set me up with some free samples of the new AmbienCR. I gave up on Ambien quite some time ago, as I was only getting four hours a night off the stuff, far too little sleep for the steep price tag. Supposedly, AmbienCR will keep me down longer. Even my doctor was doubtful it would work for me any better than regular Ambien, but we shall see. I got about 6.5 hrs. last night.
Oh, here's a link to the official announcement from Subterranean Press regarding the extended print-run of the limited of Alabaster. Right here. I must say, I am extremely pleased to learn "The Limited Edition sold out far quicker than any CRK title we’ve done before." Perhaps mass-market success continues to elude me, but at least I have the specialty press thing down pat! My thanks to everyone who's bought the book thus far.
Also, I wanted to thank the reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, who heard my pleas and sent me Tomb Raider: Legend. It arrived late last week. This is how I shall vent at the ends of these long days of editing. It may save my life (or at least may save several fragile objects from being smashed). My gratitude.
And here's a drad sort of something, courtesy Boss Tweed of Seattle (sorry, I'm not up to LJ tags this a.m.), a dead squid become a Martian in a photoessay based on H. G. Well's War of the Worlds. Yum!
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Isn't that frelling encouraging? I'm hoping we'll finish the read-through on May 6th. That's assuming we get through the prologue today (over 10K words) and then do one chapter a day with no lost days. It's a daunting schedule. The last time I can recall being so under the gun was the novel I ghosted back in '97, which was written, start to finish, in about three months. Today, I'm printing a clean copy of the whole ms., since the first draft is so marked up that many pages are illegible, hidden behind my red scribble. But I also need to read all the way through "Highway 97," tweak it however much it needs to be tweaked, and write a little intro for it. So, yeah, that's what I'll be doing today.
We stopped by my storage unit in Birmingham yesterday. I've had tons of stuff stored since we left Liberty House (the first time) in August 2001, and every now and then I stop by and rescue something. It may interest you to know that the storage facility is in the Harris Warehouse and Transfer Building, on the third floor, as featured in "The Long Hall on the Top Floor." The story was written before I even knew the building was being used for private storage. Oh, serendipity! Anyway, I found my copy of The Chocolate Alphabet, a wonderful little black-and-white comic Harlan did with Larry Todd. It was published in 1978, and I'd feared my copy was lost. But I discovered it yesterday, hidden in a box of notebooks from college.
Decent enough sleep last night, despite the nightmares. I saw my pusher...er, doctor yesterday, and she set me up with some free samples of the new AmbienCR. I gave up on Ambien quite some time ago, as I was only getting four hours a night off the stuff, far too little sleep for the steep price tag. Supposedly, AmbienCR will keep me down longer. Even my doctor was doubtful it would work for me any better than regular Ambien, but we shall see. I got about 6.5 hrs. last night.
Oh, here's a link to the official announcement from Subterranean Press regarding the extended print-run of the limited of Alabaster. Right here. I must say, I am extremely pleased to learn "The Limited Edition sold out far quicker than any CRK title we’ve done before." Perhaps mass-market success continues to elude me, but at least I have the specialty press thing down pat! My thanks to everyone who's bought the book thus far.
Also, I wanted to thank the reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, who heard my pleas and sent me Tomb Raider: Legend. It arrived late last week. This is how I shall vent at the ends of these long days of editing. It may save my life (or at least may save several fragile objects from being smashed). My gratitude.
And here's a drad sort of something, courtesy Boss Tweed of Seattle (sorry, I'm not up to LJ tags this a.m.), a dead squid become a Martian in a photoessay based on H. G. Well's War of the Worlds. Yum!
