The draft of Ninecross is done.

Numbers:

148 pages in Word.

65 pages of errata.

86900 words.

10~ish months of work.

27 days later than my self-imposed deadline of Christmas.

Eleventy billion legal pads of notes.

Another eleventy billion things I need to fix.

But it’s done.  And for that I’m celebrating.

Let’s quiet my quarter-century existential crisis with material goods.

The lovely Gen of Psyche Corp has released a music video for her newest single “Oh” and it’s delightfully spooky and gorgeous.  Check it out:

And as a thank you for donating to her Kickstarter, she sent me a poster!  It’s not up on my wall because of apartment regulations (blergh) but hopefully that’ll change at some point in the near future.

I also picked up the latest offering from Aaron Diaz of Dresden Codak, the so-titled “Distinctly Essential Dresden Codak Primer“  It’s chock full of sketches and a look into his process of character design, which I always enjoy.

And to finish things off, I bought myself some new boots for classy zombie stomping.

That’s about it, unless you want to hear about my new dish soap as well.  It’s orange scented and makes every after-dinner dishwashing smell like an orchard!

On a less materialistic slant, the first of my zombie trilogy is approaching 140 pages and not really slowing down.  I’m really gunning to have the draft complete by Christmas, which would be the third book (if you count Ascend as a book) that I’ve said that about.  Something about autumn and winter really makes me want to finish manuscripts apparently.  If you want more frequent, if obscure, updates on how it’s progressing, check out my LiveJournal, specifically the entries tagged Darkland (my terribly uncreative working title).  I often sketch out scenes there, and while it jumps around and goes over things that don’t even happen in this book, you can get a general idea of what’s happening.  Or at least I think you can.  I don’t actually know, seeing as I’m the one who’s writing the dang thing.

That’s all for now, kids.

So.  I took a mini-break and wrote some short stories.

Part of the appeal of a short story is that they’re like fun-sized candy bars, in that you get the satisfaction of eating candy but it doesn’t take nearly as long.  Except some people get really uppity about fun-sized candy bars and how they’re not really all that “fun,” so maybe a good short story is more akin to stuffing a whole candy bar into your mouth at once.

And it works on both sides of the page as well.  I don’t have to complain that some nifty scene is a hundred pages away and you get a plot that only takes fifteen minutes or so to cruise through.  Seriously, let’s just stop writing novels entirely.  Nobody wants to read that mess anymore.

So I wrote two and brushed up a third that was rather juvenile.  The two are heading towards The Machine of Death which is one of the cooler projects dreamed up by a Tyrannosaurus.  I actually started writing a story the first time when calls for the original anthology were put out, but sadly that one did not really get off the ground.  Actually it’s probably not all that sad.  Perhaps even for the best.  But anyways, fingers crossed that at least one of those makes the final cut.  And if you want to submit your own stories, the deadline’s not until the 15th so there’s still time!

And because I have a camera and like traipsing out my poor handwriting and spastic arrow-drawing ability, here’s a shot of my plotline for TRYING TO DESTROY THE MACHINE:

Trust me, it all makes sense.  Somehow.

But in case you’re a glutton for minutiae, here’s a typical Saturday in Daniel-land.  Now stop asking me until I have something real to talk about.

Coffee and catching up with the Internets when I wake.  Black.  Nothing else.

This is what me getting some writing done looks like.  My desk is kinda uncomfortable to write at for long periods of time so I use the laptop (first-world problems, I know).  Black tea (see a pattern?) and some cheese and crackers out of frame.  Wikipedia’s open in the background, probably to some ridiculous page like lighthouse architecture.

Because I live by myself, cooking has its own challenges.  Mostly, how do I eat everything because I’m only one guy.  I do most of my cooking on the weekends because my hotplate is a slowpoke and it takes double to cook anything.  Today’s foray: french onion soup.  I cut them up early and go back to writing.

There’s usually a lot of this, too.  Me standing at the window and sneering at the nasty weather and congratulating myself for staying inside today.  Sometimes there are bananas as well.

Dinner!  I cut out the twelve million hours it took to cook these onions down.  I declare this foray a wild success.

A little Minecraft action to finish out the day.  I made a terrible decision to start a new world from scratch after all the new updates (I want a wolf!) and so I have to rebuild all the different factories I took for granted in my previous world.  Seriously, I forgot how hard it was to build just a simple tree farm until I had to actually do it again.

And then sleep.  I’m sorry I don’t have a picture of that.  Actually, I’m not sorry.  I’m not a very flattering sleeper.

This was my first year (of hopefully many more) attending Wicked Faire, a giant mash-up of what-have-you alt culture that revels in a staggering line-up of concerts, vendors, burlesque, live shows, costumes, more concerts, and all around mayhem.  Exhilarating and exhausting at the same time.  I am so glad I had off for Presidents Day to recouperate.

I’m not even going to try to detail all the different bands we stumbled into so instead just go here and browse around for a while.  Acts that stood out in my mind: The Dark Clan, This Way to the Egress, and Psyche Corporation, who we hung out with after one of her performances and shoved cake in her face.

I also got a new waistcoat from Festooned Butterfly, who was in the hotel room three doors down from us and absolutely wonderful.  I must have gone through their entire collection of size 34 waistcoats before settling on the first one I had picked up.  They were all so spectacular.

Anyways, now I’m all detoxed and back to the old schedule (though this sudden snowfall is playing games with my weather senses).  My zombie epic is making rather good progress, besides its ongoing lack of a good title, and I’m learning more about natural dyes of the ancient world than I ever thought possible.  When I mysteriously get transported back to ancient Egypt and they demand verdigris dye I will totally be ready.

Now I can continue ignoring sports.

I’ve been a disciple of Nathan Bransford’s blog for a while now and I urge anyone thinking about getting serious about authorship and all that icky publishing business to read it.  It’s really indispensable I think.  Anything you could want to know about writing a query, to questions of decorum with agents, to breaking down publication rights, is covered somewhere on his site.  Additionally, he gives some nice rundowns on major happenings in the publishing world and holds all sorts of contests with his readers.  One being the Stupendously Ultimate First Paragraph contest, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

Well, I’m not really one for Internet contests (they scare me) but I said hey, why not, and I stuck the first paragraph from Wolf and the Robots Who Ate the World in there.  To my surprise, it ended up being one of the finalists.  I might have done a little dance in my chair when I read that.

So that was my excitement for the week.

That’s my excitement face.

Back in 2009 (two years ago! I’m still dealing with this new year nonsense) I got my poem “ghostglass” published in Lines + Stars, a scrappy little literary magazine that began “as a means of establishing a new creative forum in Washington, D.C., a city that all-too-often coasts solely on its more mechanistic pursuits.”  Hooray to that, I say!  So I was elated to hear that they included me in their 2009-2010 Best Of collection.  I was holding off until they announced it on their website (yes, this is the news I’ve been eluding to), but it doesn’t look like that will happen any time soon.  And these copies are burning a hole in my e-news pocket.  (Does that comparison work?  Hmm.)

Anyways, I encourage you to pick up a copy or at the very least browse around the archives and read some quality writing.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more plots to wrestle with.

And that’s why I love Minecraft.

Happy New Year, you crazy kids!  Next stop, nonstop excitement!

Stocking stuffer: The Twelve Terrors of Christmas by John Updike, as illustrated by Edward Gorey.