Wanted for Hire: One Evil Traitor, sense of humor and own dagger a must.

The revision of TALYSMANA is, has been, and will continue to be a bitch on wheels.

The problem I ran into 95% of the way through the first draft was the realization that my ending could not happen with the existing beginning. Like several other novels I’ve written, I stopped writing when I figured that out, so the first draft had no ending.

I left out something critical, only I couldn’t figure out what.

I was hoping it was something simple to fix, like a plot point.

It was, in fact, a whole entire character. This I discovered via a spiffy nightmare that tipped me in the direction of “This is what your story needs.”

Which means I’m going to have to create another character from the very start of the book (or perhaps turn one of the existing characters into the traitor).

I also realized (same spiffy nightmare) that I got half of my villain wrong. The part set in TalysMana is good. The part set in the What Is, however, is utterly wrong. Police would have been on him in three seconds. So that, too, is going to take heavy rewriting.

And oh, hell, not via nightmare but though the real-life pain of reading the manuscript, I’ve discovered the Kettan I’ve read through so far is whiny and weak, and both missed the opportunities in her past, and failed to utilize her present. There are sections where she’s okay, but overall, I loathe her.  The revised Ketten will be someone I can stand to be in the same room with.

Will Grey is good, though. I like him. Emerald is good. And Fred is awesome…but he’s based on my daughter’s basset hound, who is also awesome. Fred will come through this revision unscathed.

This is not going to be any quick, easy revision, though. This is going to be a Book Is Wrecked revision. My notebook is filling up already.

KnitCat Stares at Nothing

The migraines and vertigo are back with a vengeance, and I’m stuck in horizontal mode (laptop propped on lap and lying down as I write this, in fact).

KnitCat Naps

So Saturday, I dragged out some cotton string (a very nice German variegated yarn), and needles, and did one of the few things that doesn’t make me feel worse when this gets as bad as it is right now.

I knitted.

I’m doing this odd secret project on my day off—a writing project so weird when I first explained why I was knitting sweaters for balls of yarn, my husband got this look in his eyes that asked “do I commit her, or grab the kid and run for the hills?”

And this project calls for a cat.

KnitCat watches Mad Men

A tiny, agile, clever cat.

So I got out light-gauge florist wire and narrow green florist tape and built an armature. And then I knit around the armature, ripping back when anything happened that didn’t look like a cat, filling with yarn stuffing as I went.

KnitCat looks Regal

No pattern, no picture, no guidelines—I remembered my various cats over the years and worked from that. It took me about ten hours over the course of the day to finish him.

KnitCat hears food hit a bowl

When I was done, I showed him to my husband and son, who had seen me knitting around green armature all day, and who hadn’t seen anything particularly catlike in the blob I was making. Both of them were a little creeped out by how much of a cat he became when I started posing him.

I was a bit, too. I hadn’t expected scrap yarn and wire to turn out quite so well—and now that I see him, I’m getting a feel for his character and the role he’s going to play in my secret project.

KnitCat fights the Mighty Husband

So what’s this project? Well, it’s fiction, but it’s about writers and writing. And KnitCat is a good representative for what I’m doing. Beyond that, I’m not ready to say anything, except this project will be available for free—it’s my playtime—and should be a nice complement to other things I’ve created to help writers.

KnitCat leaves to search for adventure

As for other things, even though I’m currently bedridden (well, couch-ridden) I did manage to get work done on both TalysMana and the HTTS Walkthrough. I’m doing the plot outline for The Emerald Sun.

And I’m hoping I’ll at least be able to sit up at some point this week, so that I’ll be able to do the Hotseat interview for the Walkthrough.

Anyway… have you ever done anything as weird as knitting a cat to get to the heart of a story?

>>>–4EVR—>

The title means a lot.

I got it to Trisha Telep in time, heard back that I’d made the deadline—and we are NOT going to talk about the morning-to-next-morning hours I worked for several days getting that revision done. What was supposed to have been a 6500-word story that might creep up to 7000 words became a 12,000 word PROJECT.

But I love the story. And when The Mammoth Book of Ghost Romance comes out, it’ll be in there.

Meanwhile, with that done, I’m holding firm to my commitment to the Write A Book With Me project.

To that end…

TALYSMANA is live again. I finished chapter 26, posted chapter 26, and am prepped to do 10 minutes or 300 words a day on this from now until I wrap the first draft of the project.

What this means for Write A Book With Me folks is that we’re jumping BACK to the TalysMana blog, because that’s my WABWM project. You’ll note that Write A Book With Me now has its own tab at the top of the weblog, too.

Post your wordcounts and progress to the most recent post tagged Write A Book With Me. I can’t promise to post every day. I’ll do my best.

However, when I’ve been up to it, I’ve been working. On Rebel Tales, on NovelWritingSchool.com, and also on fiction.

I was doing pretty well with TalysMana, but my daughter has some scheduling problems right now, so we’re having to put that on hold until she gets her schedule worked out.

Meanwhile, I’m putting together some shortish serial fiction for Rebel Tales. The current piece is Help Wanted, introducing a new heroine in a new SF world. I also want to write some Cadence Drake shorts for Rebel Tales. And I’m considering what I could do in the way of Tonk short stories for Rebel Tales Fantasy–probably not Talyn, probably not Hawkspar.

You can watch the progress on the progress bars to the right.

ADDED LATER: Got 581 words on Help Wanted tonight.

I’ve been tentative about saying anything here: the whole fiction-writing process felt so fragile after the unplanned five-month hiatus—family emergency, moving, family emergency, vertigo-and-migraines.

I’m just starting to feel mostly normal most of the time, and though I’ve been able to pick up where I’d left off with stories in the past, I’d never been away from one so long without doing any other fiction.

But I’ve been making steady progress, and just wanted to breathe my sigh of relief here.

There are actually two, though I spent all night working to get everything up and running on both. (And for those who got the e-mail first and discovered you couldn’t post anything, please pretend you didn’t notice that I clearly should not be setting up anything complicated at 3 AM.)

The Rebel Tales community opens today. (And if this is old news to you, my reply is, “But now I’ve fixed the bugs!”)

And the TalysMana Be A Character Contest is finally back on track. You can vote for the character you most want to see in the book, but you only have a week to do it, because I want to get back to writing the story.

Pocket Full Of Words will be going back to the essays, commentary on writing, and other things that I previously had here which have been neglected lately.

For tonight, though…

What Kind Of Day Has It Been

Tonight, Kettan discovered exactly what went wrong in Rengarde. Her actions in the What Is had consequences she didn’t predict…but she hasn’t yet discovered why. That’s tomorrow.

Got 843 words.

If you’re playing, how are your words coming?

Today, though, I wanted to let you know her sketch is up. It’s SO much cooler than anything I was imagining.

And she’s open to comments at this point in the design process, too.

INCIDENTALLY…

I’m going to have a little contest for folks who are reading TalysMana. Becky and I are still working out the details on her end, but from my end, one reader is going to get to be in the book. (Probably to end up dying in some dramatic way…but still.)

If you’ve been dying to die heroically in a novel, make sure you’re signed up to receive the TalysMana chapters. Only story readers will be eligible for the contest, and details will be going out in one of the TalysMana e-mails soon.

Got a spiffy cliffhanger for TalysMana tonight, wrapped the scene, posted it, and some folks may even receive it yet tonight. Most of you who are up to date will get the latest installment on Friday. For everyone else, it’ll be along in due time.

Will Grey (now playing the part previously played by Bill Hawthorne) is paying off for me. He came through for me tonight, he’s showing me more of who he is, and I like him.

And Kettan made me laugh.

I got some subtle tension into the scene, too. That’s where I’ll be picking up when I start in tomorrow night…with the little thing that went wrong.

If you’re playing WABWM, I hope your story is coming along for you.