This post would have been on time, but LJ ate it.

((And then restored it from a saved draft.  The original subject line was something like "Slipping this one in just under the wire," but, perhaps appropriately, LJ didn't restore that.))

And I'll admit I'm still not sure what I want to talk about. But it's important to me to just keep putting words on page, habitually, any day, no matter how uninspired I may feel, until it's a permanent, automatic behavior pattern. Or that's the hope.

Sadly, it's not just the blog that's dry and empty right now. My notebooks are also feeling a bit neglected. It's been six months, and I'm still adjusting to the fact that Running In Her Veins is over and done with, and I haven't entirely settled on a single other project. I'm researching a talking-animal story, working title of Cat Among The Rushes, that Megan and I started talking about one night as something to co-write, starting this summer if she has the time. While there are enough cliches in the animal-story genre that I cringe to think of it, some of my favorite books fall under the heading: Watership Down, Redwall (I don't care much for the later Redwall books, but the first few are just so much fun), Book of Night With Moon... and I think we've got an angle on the genre I haven't seen before.  But no actual work has been done on the story yet...

Allegedly, I'm working on The Hellion Prince, first in a trilogy of dark, swashbuckling secondary-world fantasy stories about treachery and politics in a human magocracy surrounded by the fey.  I have over twenty thousand words written, and I confess that I like those words very much, and I have a very clear vision of how this book should go and... it's not working.  Most of the 20k consists of two extended conversations written for backstory purposes, and the not-quite-hero of the tale is limp and uninspiring in all the scenes necessary to the plot.  Something needs to be shaken up about this story and this character, but I'm not sure what.

And then, of course, there's the third book I'm not really working on right now:  A Stain Upon His Hands, the sequel to Running In Her Veins.  I decided to put it off and work on The Hellion Prince because, put simply, I'm not that good yet - I don't have the chops to pull off the book I want Stain (or ASUHH, my usual abbreviation) to be.  I've got the first three pages done, relatively satisfactorily, but as with RIHV, the transitions in between major plot points are still totally obscure to me, and I realized the other day that, when written out, there are 15 discernible story arcs within the novel as outlined.  That's a few too many, I think, but I have absolutely no clue where or how to trim pieces off or divide the sucker into two books.  So...

... like here on the blog, I'm left to meander, and reflect, and peck out a page or two here or there, waiting to see what happens.  I can live with that.

((and LJ ate the line I wrote to conclude this post, too!  OUTRAGED.  I can't remember what it was and I'm too tired to try.  Pretend it was pithy!))

Knight Agency Contest.

So, there's an agency that's looking for the best 3-sentence, 150-word max summaries of completed, unpublished novels, and will be requesting to read the manuscripts of the best 20.  Given that I am (perpetually) about two days from having RIHV all typed up, this seems like a dream come true to me.

Except that I suck at summaries.  I trimmed the one I posted last month down to 95 words, but am entirely disgusted with it.  A (brilliant) friend suggested that I write a drabble-summary, and maybe I will, but first I'd like feedback- both from people who have read RIHV, and might be able to tell me what I'm missing and what I described wrong, and from those of you who haven't, and can tell me in excruciating detail why my pitch is boring and cliched, and what would need to change before they'd be interested in reading.

Self-deprecation aside, really, please be very very critical.  ♥


The men who kidnapped Jordan say that they’re protecting her from her biological father, a man who belongs to an immortal cabal of killers that have bound their souls to demons to gain eternal youth.  Casimir is one of the hunters her father has sent after her, an unsympathetic but silver-tongued assassin whose hesitancy to shed blood has made him weak and ridiculed by his fellows.  Capturing Jordan is supposed to bring him the respect and power that should be his, but he isn't the only one hunting her... and Jordan is far from defenseless.

New fiction.

Someone expressed a wish for some more fiction, and I happen to have some lying around - not new, exactly, but an unposted continuation of a fragmentary... thing. Here are all three parts of it so far, in chronological order. It's a (I think) secondary-world fantasy with an emphasis on romance and atypical post-apocalyptic mythology. Possibly a novel, but if so, not one I expect to be working on any time soon. The main characters are Neminth, an apprentice scrivener in one of the world's last libraries, and Shisya, a dedicant of an order of warriors who preserve the old laws of their fallen kingdom despite the ruin, anarchy, and hopelessness of the world around them.

( Part I: When Neminth Met Shisya )

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( Part II: The pen is mightier... )

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( Mirror, mirror on the wall (unposted before this; might actually occur in between part I & part II) )

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I recognize that cuts off rather unsatisfactorily, but well, tough. I'm unsatisfied too, and would very dearly like to know what happens next.