I'm Alive!

Hey there, everyone! Just dropping in to reassure you that I have not been eaten by the zombies. I moved and started a new job, and my childhood just ended with the last Harry Potter movie installment. Mischief Managed. It has left me a bit drained of energy and free-time, so, I decided to devote what I had to my fiction writing instead of my blog.

BUT, I'm taking the bus to work, which has given me the perfect opportunity to do some reading. Luckily, I don't tend to get motion sickness from reading. So here are the books I've recently finished:

BEHEMOTH by Scott Westerfeld ***** The second book in the trilogy was excellent. I adore the main characters. Scott Westerfeld does something I think is very hard, which is writing from two characters' points of view and making them both so completely interesting that you're not bored by POV change. And it's a WWI alternate-history with steampunk bio-engineered airship-whales fighting against dieselpunk mecha. This second book got political, and the stakes got higher, and the characters got more conflicted and interesting. I'm seriously looking forward to the third installment, which comes out in September.

SUNSHINE by Robin McKinley ****1/2 The book was wonderful, glorious--the vampire book for people who don't like vampire books. But I wanted about five more pages after where she ended it which is why I hesitated to give it the final 1/2 star. I loved every bit of the last page. I just wanted a tiny bit more.

THE NAME OF THE STAR by Maureen Johnson **** MY lovely roommate brought home an ARC of this book from ALA, and I read it almost immediately. This is probably my favorite of Maureen Johnson's books, and I think she handled the supernatural element really well. I'm not afraid to admit I stayed up really late reading, because the first half of the book was a bit too scary to put down. Hey, it's about Jack the Ripper. And ghosts. I did find myself gravitating more toward two supernatural characters as love interests rather than the main character's hunky classmate.

Currently, I'm reading: "Red Sea under Red Sky" by Scott Lynch, "Sabriel" by Garth Nix, and one of Brandon Sanderson's original novels, which I'm reading on the Kindle for iPhone app.

Is it weird that I usually want to buy the novel again in paperback if I've liked it? Does anyone else do that?

It's Gently-Wafting Curtains for me...

Well, it's the 26th and I'm not quite at the half-way point on revising "The Mark of Flight". There's no way I'm going to achieve the goals I set for myself in this post, so I'm going to have to bear the consequences.

Now, I could just skim through the rest of MoF, half-ass the first lesson on HELLHOUND, and send out a bunch of queries for a manuscript that isn't quite ready, but everyone knows I'm not going to do that. I've invested too much time in both of these stories to give them anything but my best.

With MoF, I realized there are two scenes that need a bit of rewriting now that I've changed the beginning. I'm also a little concerned with how the relationships of the three main characters appear by the half-way point, when they've all gotten split up. I don't know if they've spent enough time together to care about each other yet, or if they even need to care about each other. Duty and guilt is enough to fuel most of the forward action, and the relationships can develop later on.

I decided it was time to get some professional help. (For my manuscript, shut up!) I've contacted a freelance editor I found linked on another author's site and am waiting for a quote and sample. Apparently, her novel edits can be as low as $200, which is really reasonable considering some of her clients have recently been picked up by agents. So yes. As soon as I rewrite those little bits I need for continuity, I'm hoping to ship it off to someone who can take a look at it from an outsider's POV and give me some good advice.

I haven't started on HELLHOUND yet, but I've been brainstorming some great revisions for it, which involve playing laser-tag for the first time since high school. Anyway, I don't want to rush through either revision just to avoid my punishment, so I guess you guys will get to see me torturing myself with the New Moon movie. At least there will be booze involved.

I need a "Team Buffy" tee-shirt.