Wednesdays suck in general. Today, mine is worse than usual, so I decided to do something good to offset all the bad karma.
There’s a one-day-only Hump Day sale on my writing books—15% off on any of them that you buy. Buy one or all three and get the discount.
Right now the book is available—the description is short and the free preview isn’t loaded. I’ll do all the catalog work on Monday. But I know people are waiting for the book, and if you’re one of those people, you can get your copy now.
Thank you for all the encouragement and enthusiasm. Let me know what you think.
Thanks to the comments, suggestions, questions, and edits of Heather and Christian, the two beta-testers for the Create A Culture Clinic (both of whom nailed their deadlines—thank you both!), I’m now deep in the final revision before publishing the e-book.
Quick comments from the beta-testers:
Heather:
This is absolutely fabulous. I write present-day, and had always sort of assumed I didn’t need to worry about “that culture stuff”. The detailed questions hit every aspect of life I could imagine, and a bunch I couldn’t, and I already see tons of ways to incorporate culture into my writing.
My head is spinning. This is definitely a resource that I will use again and again. I am doing final edits (using SOMEBODY’S “One pass revision” process) on two novels at the moment, and I want to redo both of them to make their cultures more rich. (I shall not, though. What I’ll do is use the clinic on my NEXT novel.
Christian:
While I didn’t initially feel a connection to the subject matter, I found that it really helped me to get over an issue I’ve been having with my current novel project in which I have created a supernatural culture that I hadn’t fleshed out completely. Using a modified version of your clinic, I was able to do some slight reworkings in the storyline and solve the issues! Yay!
Will make the book available as soon as humanly possible.
HeatherCW and onesikmonkee, providing they can get edits and comments back to me by WEDNESDAY evening, win the roles of Culture Clinic guinea pigs.
If either of them can’t, I’ll do a second run through the entries, and struggle to choose again.
These were very tough choices, and there were a lot of folks who will still be in the running.
And thank you again, everyone, for your wonderful entries, which DID make me feel better.
I’d very much like to have two volunteers to give Holly Lisle’s Create A Character Clinic a test run, take it apart, see where instructions are unclear, and find typos and spellos (though I’m doing those, too, but I suck at copyediting). Your test drive should involve actually creating a working culture notebook and a culture to put in it. NOT a complete culture. Just a three-or-four items per section culture. I figure this should take, at most, about five hours of your time (if you don’t let yourself get sucked in). Trying to do the whole book from start to finish would take about a year, I guess.
The book is designed to be read in any order (after you’ve read the instructions in Section One), and permits broad, deep, and mixed development of a culture.
If you would like to volunteer as a Culture Clinic test driver, please post why you’d like to do it here. I’m kind of down, so the funniest two entries (that also demonstrate the sort of spelling and punctuation characteristics that good copyeditors should have) will get PDF copies of the rough version, and will also receive recognition in the acknowledgments, and free final copies in PDF form when the book is done.
I’ll make my selections on Monday, Nov. 6th.
Both thank you, and good luck.
Culture Clinic is moving along. Check out the progress bar. Hope to finish rough edits tomorrow.
My bud sent me a book on bookbinding some time ago, and I picked up one on handmade books. Things have to float around in my subconscious for a while before I figure out what to do with them, and these books were like that.
I don’t know if it was the fever, or just a connection of strange dreams and good timing, but I had this amazing idea while I was sickest—to take the moonroading background I’ve been working up in my head (for The Ruby Key and the MOON & SUN series) and do it as a painted journal written by the cat for the girl who’s the hero of the series. Ang the Cat’s Secret Guide to Moonroading. I don’t know if it’s anything Scholastic will be interested in, but if it isn’t, I can always do it as an e-book and a full-color art book on Lulu.
Today I’m doing the copyedit for Night Echoes, and it’s been one of those days. I’m not completely better yet (though Thera-flu, Cold-Eze, and other things have helped a lot), but deadlines know no mercy. The cat is purring on my shoulder as I write this, though, and I remind myself that I could as easily be at work in a hospital where everyone else is sick, too, and nobody can take sick time because then there’d be no nurses at all, and I am deeply grateful to be doing copyedits on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and sipping hot tea.
Should have this done today, should be doing copyedits on the Create a Character Clinic tomorrow. And then getting ready to give the kid some fun on Halloween.
Hope you’re doing well, and thank you for the good wishes. I appreciate them.
Received the copyedits for NIGHT ECHOES—they’re pretty clean. Shouldn’t take long, but I feel dreadful. The kidlet caught something, and now we’ve caught it. So work is catch-as-catch-can for the next few days.
Have to do the copyedit of NIGHT ECHOES tomorrow. Will proof and publish Culture Clinic when that is done.
Actually, the mail part of the process of sending out contest winners’ books wasn’t too time consuming. Finding the books, however, was a nightmare. It turns out that I have no more copies of either Diplomacy of Wolves or Vengeance of Dragons (or if I have them, they’re buried far, far away from all the rest of my author’s copies.) But I didn’t determine this until I’d turned the house upside-down trying to find them.
So no words got written and no charts got made today. I did, however, discover that someone found my website with the following search.
“do nurses get paid less than football players”
Long pause while you consider this question. Any guesses on the answer?
The answer to that question is Yes. Lots less. Bunches less. Unimaginable mountains less. If your job options are professional nurse or professional football player and money means anything to you, play football. The pro football contract-minimum salary is about twenty times what a top nurse makes in a year, and if you’re any good, the salary inequity becomes staggering.
If you like your knees, though, and you value people, be a nurse. It’s a critical job, and you never doubt that you’re doing something with your life that makes a difference.