Made it up to page 12 yesterday, so not a very good production day. I spent time doing some reading up on the Mexican-American war and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. I also got back the final edits on the rewrite for Paradox from aliettedb and all looks good on that front. I'll wait to print it out until the end of the month, so I can go over it one last time after having had some time away from it. I've already made a start on today's work, so I'm late posting progress (almost forgot to do it!:)).

Yesterday's writing resulted in about 3 different versions of a tag-line for my novel, none of which are right yet, but I feel like I'm on the right track, just mostly a matter of rearranging things into a coherent sentence (it seems incredibly long too, about 70 words for a single sentence, which makes me wonder if I'm trying to cram too much into the sentence). I do have an article from SFWA to look at to help me, so I'm confident I can whip this into shape.

In other news, for the first time I've had a copy-editor fact-checking a story of mine prior to publication and I'm really glad the mag does this because in fact she found a few errors in my Nahuatl in the story, all of which thankfully appear to be transcription errors on my part. This of course makes me wonder how many other errors I've made in my other stories that were never caught because no one's ever taken the time to fact check it (and if I misspell a difficult word the first time I use it, I will misspell every time after because I refer back to that first spelling, not the reference book). I'm very pleased that GUD takes its fiction serious enough to make sure they're putting out a quality product, and while initially I felt sort of foolish for making such dumb mistakes, I feel its much better to catch them at this point in the process rather than having them pointed out by a reader after publication. This has also made me resolve to keep a research file on every story I write, so that I can fact-check myself later before sending out (use those history major skills like I would in college). Given that the story in question is a pretty old story, the first one I wrote in my One World series, I have practically no memory of which sources I pulled my information out of and so I had to go back and look in all my sources and figure things out. I had the same problem when I was going back through the recent rewrite I did of "The Place That Makes You Happiest." I grabbed a Nahuatl phrase from one of my Codex Florentine books and put it in the story about a month and a half ago, but when I went back and reread it the other day and came to that word, I had no idea what it was and even after scouring the book I thought I took it from, I couldn't find it again. Frustrating, to say the least, and of course then I had to cut the word completely because I didn't even know what it meant in order to make it coherent with context. I think taking the time to record my sources for myself while I'm working will save me a bundle of headaches later on.

No "real" writing has gotten done in days, but oh the muse is so terribly excited and demanding I drop everything and turn him loose. I've been brain-storming the character and plot problems for my novel with some of my writing group friends for the last couple of days, and now that I've shared the rest of the basic plot line of the story with them, I've been steered in the right direction and muse is screaming "That's f-ing awesome! This next draft is so going to rock!" My biggest issue was with my protag's motivations and her lack of being an active agent of the plot and its resolution and I kept putting off addressing her issues for the longest time because it was a big cloud hanging over me. But last night I spent an hour and half just writing up a couple paragraphs about her motivations, just thinking aloud about what she wants and what's important to her and trying to see how that relates to what the other main character wants, particularly over the entire storyline of both books, and now it's finally come together. I think the motivations were always there in my mind but I'd done other things wrong, blocking them from playing a part, or I made it impossible for her act or make a choice, or if she did make a choice, it turned out to be a non-choice. I gave my protag too much access to free-magic to solve all her problems with little consequence (big rule violation concerning magic and it's trade off values, which any decent fantasy novelist wouldn't have made, but I'm new at this and feeling my way around. At least I resisted my urge to try to query some agents about this book before now and so didn't ruin my chances with any of them). I also gave that same real consequence-free magic to another character and basically made it impossible for the antagonist to even have a fighting chance (not to mention that with this power, this other character should have just used it as soon as he was an adult and everything would have been over, happy happy joy joy! So now I snatch it back from him, ha! and make it much harder for my protag to use what she can, and now the antagonist has a fighting chance and she's the only one who can stop him. And the non-choice she originally made...gone, and she's going to have a much, much tougher one to make. Plus I get to keep around a character I really really hated killing off and he can cause grief and temptation for my protag in book two. And I get to bring in more gods! Hurray! After these sessions, I've come to the conclusion that I held back too much of the broader plot in this book, mistakenly thinking I needed to save it for book two, but in fact, if the protag knows some things about the broader plan of her beloved god, it gives her extra motivation to succeed and help out.

The muse is biting and clawing to get to writing, but I'll have to muzzle him for a little while, so I can write a query and see how my protag's motivations hold up. Then it will be off to another rewrite of the outline. Plus, it was recommended that I take a look at The Mists of Avalon, since I'm doing something similar in that I'm taking a myth (not a really well-known one, but the most well-known of that particular culture's mythology) and telling it from an alternate character's POV, so I bought that yesterday and plan to read it (this is the first time I've ever bought a novel with the intent of studying it in hopes of helping my own writing.).

And in other good news, the Zokutou word meter is back up and running again. Quite pleased to see that.

I spent most of my day reading agent blogs...well, Nathan Bransford's in particular, whom I've decided that when the time comes I will query regarding my novel. He seems like a nice, personable guy who'd be nice to work with (and he's pretty darn funny). I should probably be making some personal notes about each of these agents, things I notice that could help me craft queries specifically for them (like NB despises opening queries with rhetorical questions. Not that I would have, or had even contemplated doing so....). Barring any sudden inspiration on the short story front, I'm probably going to spend this week researching agents and reading blogs and getting a feel for who's out there and who I might eventually want to approach for representation. I also talked myself into joining Pike Peak Writers, which hosts an annual writer's conference in Colorado Springs which I'd like to go to but am glaring at the $300 price tag. I don't feel anywhere ready to have a one-on-one with an agent or an editor, and the thought of reading any part of my novel aloud in front of a crowd for an agent or editor to critique makes me physically sick to even contemplate. Or maybe I've been hiding on the internet too long and have forgotten what it's like to be in a face-to-face crit group like back in college (though in college there's was always the comfort of knowing that 90% of them didn't know anything useful about writing and took the class thinking it would be an easy 3 credits.). If I decided to go this year, it would be only in an observational capacity, but I'm not sure if that's worth $300 bucks plus hotel. Anyone been to the PPWC and care to share their experience? Or to any conference for that matter?

Or whichever ring is specifically reserved for those struggling to write query letters. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! I've got about a page of notes, I even cracked open my copy of How to Write Irresistible Query Letters (which I almost immediately threw aside and said, "This is such crap!"), then spent the rest of the evening trolling the Snarkives for tidbits of wisdom to help me along. Tomorrow I'll troll the archives over at Nathan Bransford's blog and Pubrants, to see what else I can dig up that will enlighten me and help me turn what right now sounds like a very typical fantasy plot into something that feels special like my novel. Miss Snark was right: this will take at least a month to write "good." Unfortunately I have to have something by Friday to submit with said novel to crit group, and while I love my novel, I'm embarrassed by my query letter so far.

I think I'll go down some gin (well, probably a Bacardi Silver Raz, because hard liquor gives me headaches these days, and gin tastes like what I imagine paint thinner would taste like) then go to bed, and hopefully wake up tomorrow bright-eyed and ready to conquer query-land again.

Morning Star Rising

78,997 / 150,000 (52.7%)

Well, a rather pathetic day yesterday. Why is that? It came to my attention a few days ago that the city I set most of the novel in is in fact a highly-excavated site and I'd never looked at it before writing the book. The city is so rarely mentioned in history texts so I thought it was a place known only through story and myth sources, but in fact it was a real city, and I spent several hours looking at pictures of it on the internet (and man is it freakin' awesome!) and even found it on Google Earth, complete with accompanying photographs to enhance the aerials. When I finally convince Jeff to take us to Mexico, I'm demanding to go to this site (Xochicalco). I wonder if I could talk him into it before I decide to start shopping this novel, which--since I imagined the city completely wrong and so will necessitate a third draft to fix that problem--could be a while now. I'd really love to see the ruins, particularly the carvings on the Temple of Quetzalcóatl, which are absolutely beautiful. I'd love to actually stand in the city my novel takes place in and get a feel for its dimensions and layout and imagine what it might have looked like back when it was still inhabited. After much debate, I decided to not stall the 2nd draft to go back and correct the city's details and instead intend to continue plowing through. I'm going to attempt to work in the new details from here on out, to lessen the work load later, but I'm going to save most of that until the third draft.

I'm not so sure how much I'm going to get done today either. I was up quite a bit last night, regretting McDonald's for dinner, so I'm exhausted this morning. Plus, Fiona has a vet appointment in about an hour and that will probably last about 45 minutes and it will take me a good half hour to get back home. Then I'll probably want to sleep. So I'm only counting on getting in an hour or two of writing today.

Morning Star Rising

124,593 / 150,000 (82.0%)

  
I didn't get a whole lot done today, thanks to needing to do some research on the ritual ball game--and I found a really cool website devoted to it. On the upside of things, the neighbors have found someone else to take care of the baby so today was my last day watching him and so I shall be setting back into my old schedule next week (which is a good thing since I have a lot of reading and critiquing to do in the next two weeks, in addition to keeping up with getting this novel done.

So I started back to writing this morning, got about a paragraph done before I decided I needed to look at my book to refresh my  memory on a particular part I was going to be writing about. But having read that and done a spot of research on a name I was unfamiliar with, suddenly almost everything I wrote yesterday has been blown out of the water and has to be rewritten. I hate it when that happens, but of course, the story will be better and truer to the mythology by making the change. It's one of those instances where I wish I'd researched the name when I first saw it, before I started working on this story, instead of just dismissing it as a place name of no consequence. But I learned something new about the mythology today and that's always a positive.

So the plan for today is to cut off the beginning of the story and put a basic skeleton there, until I can get back to it, and make some other minor tweaks in the middle, and start rewriting from where I went wrong.

I did some skimming through The Flayed God last night, looking for the next story ideas for my Sixth Sun Rising series and I think I've found it. I'm in a retelling-the-old-myths mode when it comes to this series, which I feel is a good thing since no many folks know much about Aztec myths, so it's much more fertile ground than Greek, Roman, or British Isles mythology. I've been spending so much time building my catalogue of One World stories (Aztec alternate history-science fiction series, for those who don't know) that I'm really kind of behind on this fantasy series. If I had a good working notion of what this new story was going to be, I'd start on it today and give myself some time away from the Malinche story, but I'm not quite that far into the process for it yet and so should let it brew in my head over the weekend before embarking on that. Maybe I can have a draft ready in time for the polish challenge at LH.

Malinche Story

10,876 / 15,000 (72.5%)

It's been excrutiatingly difficult getting through this middle section. I keep getting caught up in doing other things rather than just holding my nose and getting through this. Today it was seeking out a freeware program that would allow me to make my own cross-stitch patterns (I didn't find one, but I did find some grids and so using Microsoft Paint I made a new, more simplistic pattern of Tezcatlipoca than the one I've been working on. It now has 6 colors rather than 24). I did spend a bit of time doing research today though, trying to locate the name of the king of Tlaxcala circa 1520 (though it turns out there wasn't a king, but rather a council that oversaw the political and military issues of the entire area, but I've got actual names to work with. For those interested in the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, I highly recommend Hugh Thomas's book Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico. It's easy to read, but also incredibly detailed.).

Well, hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.