Tag: Blackdale

On the agony of editing

I long for greener places. | Valle de Cocora, Colombia, January 2014.

I long for greener places. | Valle de Cocora, Colombia, January 2014.



I was going to write a much longer and more florid post, and in fact I did, but then OmmWriter Dana II fucking ate it after assuring me it had just saved it.

I am taking a sick day today to combat a malady and to avoid public transit when I can very well write press releases from home, and am unwilling to compromise any more time blogging when I could be working further on my current neck-albatross: The Autumn Sword, the next tale about my detective character set in a fantasy, Victorian-coded world where magic and feudalism are jealously guarding against technology and democracy.

I let this story get away from me. It is now at novella length, and this post is merely me complaining about having to keep fucking editing it when I long ago lost any passion for doing so. This is the part of writing that is work, my children.

Picture above is for inspiration on this, the laziest of days.

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Saint of Amaranth – On the virtue of writing shorter (and more)

For a few years now I have had the grand idea for a flashy novel of high Victorian fiction that occurs in a twisty world of magic and gaslights. This is not remotely original, but I want to write it anyway, because I am really not that great a novelist, you see.

I don’t believe that just because a genre may employ lots of tropes and conventions that they must every one of them be defied for the resulting work to be original and fun. And I sort of really like Dracula by Bram Stoker, the original incarnation, and there is part of me that likes Vanity Fair and even Tess of the D’Ubervilles, so I guess there really never was any hope for me. I began to bang out a plot outline in a long, long summary of the book. This was essentially because I was more enthusiastic about the idea than I was about actually writing the thing, which I planned to write in florid, overwrought 19th-century prose, you see.

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