A Shameful Hiatus

Sorry for the lack of updates. NaNoWriMo is taking a bigger toll on my time than I expected, mostly because I've somehow stumbled into crunch mode at work, rather than the usual holiday slack-a-day festivities we get this time of year. When you've got a terrible batch of deadlines bearing down on you, spending your workday writing demonstrable crap is not smiled on.

To add to the fun, I got word back this week on three (yes three) novel pitches I sent in to a publisher. The idea (I suspect I've posted on this before) was that I would pitch three takes on a book dealing with a particular subject, and the editors would bat these around and pick the best of breed, or possibly suggest blending two of them together.

The actual result: The editors liked the heroes of one pitch, the villains of a second pitch, and the military elements of a third pitch. So my assignment will be to distill all the bits that the editors like and build a full synopsis based on whatever I come up with.

Happily, I like the heroes and the villains the editors like (and I think there's a lesson there), so getting to use them both is just great. And I was never invested enough in prewriting for any one story to feel that I have to junk anything. Now I just need to deliver five or ten pages of synopsis before I get a polite but firm reminder...

--Dave

Author's Log

Nearly 20,000 words since my last blog post, almost all of which will be murdered by the Red Pen of Doom sometime in December. Still a great level of output.

Current Reading

Dreaming in Code, by Scott Rosenberg, one of the founders of Salon.com. It's a biography or post-mortem of an attempt to develop a rival to Microsoft Outlook. There's something about software disaster documentaries that just appeals to me, mostly because they aren't happening to me!

Also, getting back into Grave Peril after a long break. Nothing against the book, I just got distracted by some others that were shorter or obligatory. Unfortunately I peeked at the back cover of the forth book in the series, which did a magnificent job of spoiling the third one in its first sentence. That's strike one, Mr. Butcher. Let's not have that happen again.

Finally, for comic book fans, the hardcover of Wolverine: Old Man Logan is out now. It's an excellent read for fans of Mark Millar's earlier work on Wolverine: Enemy of the State, as well as people who like westerns such as Unforgiven. That said, it's a very quick read once you get started, and the hardcover isn't exactly packed with extra features, so I'd encourage you to wait for the softcover edition if you're short on cash.