In Which Our Heroine Theorizes Further About Revisions

20 November 2005

Mark is home for the week, and I am glad to see him, and Timprov is, and Ista is, and later this afternoon some more people will be, too. I once read someone saying that you're still newlyweds if you miss your spouse when they're gone less than a week. We've got a little over six years of newlywed bliss here, apparently, and it sounds like my folks have over thirty.

Sampo and I are still having a wrestling match. I don't know who's winning. I'll let you know when I figure it out. I keep saying I've never gotten a book this wrong on the first draft before, and I really think it's true. But it'll be worth it eventually. It is improving. I think I can say that without caveat. But it had a good ways to go, and still does.

My current theory is that it will be a very good thing if all my own rewrites are done before Christmas, so I can pass it along to people to crit around then, and if they have more time with some kind of vacation, well and good, and if they don't, it can wait until they do. With Thermionic Night, I felt I needed an alpha reader/beta reader structure to verify that the very basics of the book were worthwhile. This is a very different situation: Sampo is firmly a sequel, not a stand-alone, so the pool of potential readers is more limited. And the basic conceit is in much less doubt. So. I'll just contact the previous group and see who's interested when I'm ready.

I finished reading Gwyneth Jones's Castles Made of Sand and am drooling after the rest of the series, but it's not available here yet. I'll see if Uncle Hugo's carries it, or Dreamhaven, and if not, I know in which direction to make sad pathetic faces (east and north, mostly). I'm now reading Elizabeth Willey's The Well-Favored Man, and so far I'm enjoying it, and so far I'm having to remind myself of the ways in which it isn't reminiscent of the Amber series. Those ways are many, and yet the similarities keep popping up more strongly. I'm also still reading East Central Europe between the Two World Wars, but Joseph Rothschild is not what one might call a master of style, so I'm reading that for content alone, alas.

We tend to end family phone calls with, "I don't know too much more." But in fact I know several more things. I just don't feel like saying them right now.

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