Technical Difficulties

The tasks I set myself yesterday to do today got preempted by a new task: write synopsis of The Emperor of the Elflands so my agent can present it to my editor like half a dead vole.

Or, you know, not.

That task has not been finished, because I hate writing synopses--hate it, precious, hate it we does--so my other tasks also languish. Although I did get the assassination attempt finished.

Q: Would you say that Cymellune is more equivalent to Atlantis, the Minoan Empire, or the Roman Empire?

A: I like this question.

Cymellune of the Waters is a lot Atlantis and a little bit Venice and maybe a smidgen of Sodom & Gomorrah. The labyrinths thing, yes, loops over to Minoan Crete, and there's a good deal of the Byzantine Empire in some places, and certainly the way Marathat and Tibernia relate to it is a lot like the way later nations related to the Roman Empire.

In other words, yes.

(As a bonus answer, the fall of the empire of Lucrèce is the fall of Troy, only I reversed things so it's the Trojans bringing the Achaians down.)

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Q: Do you "outlining" your books? If so, what does that entail? A thesis-like outline (I. 1. a. i. that sort of thing) or is your method more organic? When do you consider an outline "finished" and do you then feel the book is ready to begin, or do you revise the outline?

A: No, I don't outline my books--at least, not before I write them. Part of my revision process is doing what's called a reverse outline, where you take a finished piece of writing and make an outline of what you've written. Incredibly helpful in both fiction and non-fiction for catching redundancy and continuity gaps.

I may sometimes know things about where a story is going, and I certainly do write those things down. (Because otherwise I will forget them, and nothing drives me more bonkers than knowing there's something I used to know about a story that I am now completely unable to dredge up out of the murk.)

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The Marriage of True Minds, Part 1 (of 10): 2,000 words

This story is the exception to the rule I claimed above, as I'm using the International Spy Museum's version of the Moscow Rules (from a postcard matociquala has on her fridge) to structure it. So it has ten parts, and in each of the ten parts, I know roughly what happens. In a structural sense, anyway. The actual plot is still largely a mystery. I don't know if this is going to work, but the previous version of the story most certainly does NOT, so it can't hurt anything to experiment. Also, I am writing again for the first time since I turned in Corambis, and it does, in fact, feel pretty darn good.

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jaylake said two important things on Monday: "writing a book is like exercising — it feels terrific when I’m doing it, but vaguely intimidating and overwhelming when I’m not doing it" and "the best cure for writing angst is writing." With the new flat panel, I can't use my monitor as a bulletin board any longer, but if I could, you bet those would be going up.