Editing etc

[erastes]

I cannot believe how much better I feel today. It’s like magic; over the past 3-4 days I’ve been dragging myself around, literally holding onto the furniture to stop collapsing – and today I’m walking almost like a human being. Well, ok a human weeble hybrid, at least.

I’ve just had an unpleasant email from an esmeralda greene. I don’t know what I ever did to upset her, seeing as I’ve never heard of her in my life. Thank you so much!

Started on the edits for Muffled Drum. I don’t have line edits yet, the editor has given me an outline of the sections that she thinks need fleshing out, concepts that need a little more explanation, that kind of thing. She’s dead right, and in fact while I was writing it I knew that a romance publisher would have problems with some of the book. I’d sort of swept stuff under the carpet, and that’s not good writing, it’s lazy.

Why am I surprised! LOL. I heard a quote from someone yesterday—can’t remember who it was, Someone like Tennyson or suchlike -  but they said if they had a set figure of money, (quite low) they would be happy to loaf for the rest of their lives. I grok this. Loafing is my default state. I used to be able to spend my entire holidays from work lying on the floor at home, on my own and completely content. Time enough for Loaf. Put it on my tombstone.

I’m also going to rework Chiaroscuro and submit it for Carina’s decision. The rights from Aspen Mountain Press run out in January, and I’ve never really been satisfied with the story as it stands. It was supposed to be a novel, but I lost inspiration with it after 7k or so—but when the Aspen anthology call came along for vampires, I fleshed it out to a small novella and sent it off. I’d like to push it up to 20k perhaps (it’s 13k at the present, and too small for Carina) and see if that makes the story gel a little better. I can see a repeat of “you need to explain this a little more” if I were to let it go as it was, even if I add the 3k it needs to be the minimum for their submission process. I would like to revamp it – ‘scuse the pun! – and push it more towards the plotline I had originally planned. We’ll see. It would be good to get it into a larger pond.

It’s odd though, re-reading stuff. I almost never re-read anything once it’s been published, but I read part of Chiaroscuro yesterday and it seemed as if it had been written by someone else. There are parts in it that I have absolutely no memory of. Odd.

 

- - -  -  - -