eddyfate

My blurb on MET Awakening is on page 32 of the latest White Wolf eQuarterly, along with looks into the upcoming Changeling: The Lost, Monte Cook's World of Darkness and a bunch of other upcoming products. It's in PDF format, and you might have to upgrade to Acrobat Reader 8 to view the file (at least, that's what I did).

After finishing up Digital Dirge (which I've heard is now on the appropriate person's desk), I had plans for Wednesday (a monthly dinner with some of my friends) and Thursday (an appointment with my hair stylist), so I figured I would have Friday to work on the player's guide for the LARP, and the weekend to hammer out just about everything else I needed to do so I could use all next week to focus on making sure the characters all flowed well. Turns out that I need to do a quick last-minute revision on MET Awakening; White Wolf changed their process of layout since I started the manuscript, so I need to update my material accordingly. So tonight, I have to focus on that, which pushes things back a little bit. Further, one of my support people for the LARP who was helping with characters is having nasty internet problems, so next week will be interesting.

On "The Bureau," I've got the six characters in the Bureau detailed, the first novel/story arc roughly planned out, and a few ideas for future stories. It might be a week or so before I start actually writing the first story out. Odds are pretty good that I'll be sharing this stuff on the internet in some way, and I'm vaguely curious how my loyal audience would like to receive such content (note that you can select more than one option):

Poll #1008298 How do you want to get your fiction?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

What methods would you like to get original fiction in?

I just realized that I haven't updated in over a week. Whoops.

Last week at work was a huge site visit that took up much of my time and brainpower. Afterward, my boss suggested I take a day off. I decided to take two instead and make a four-day weekend, in order to focus on catching up on writing stuff that had built up. (This week my boss is at another conference, so I've been catching up at work as well, and thus things are much slower.)

I started by getting some of my technological toys sorted out. I have had my calendar, tasks and email on three separate applications, and they were haphazardly patched to an aging PDA. When garchangel pointed out that my phone could do much of what I was using the PDA for, I migrated everything over to Outlook 2003, set up the appropriate applications on my phone, and got most everything sorted out (I'm still having a weird problem with Plaxo Mobile). Migrating my mail and calendar took a while, but I have everything in one place and was able to phase out an extra bit of technostuff in the process. While it might seem like this has nothing to do with writing, it actually helps me stay on top of my deadlines as well as preparing my portable technology for con season -- it's much easier to look up my schedule and people's contact information in one place instead of trying to juggle two.

I spent most of that four-day weekend cranking out the final bits of MET: Awakening. The actual final draft was done a couple of weeks ago, but I needed to work on how I wanted the character sheet to be laid out, as well as a few other things which I hope will help Storytellers and Narrators out. It ended up taking on a lot more time than I expected, but it was all done before the deadline.

Meanwhile, I spent an entire day focusing on the problems with Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. Thanks to some great feedback, I figured out what was going wrong with it, and got a lot of notes down. Tuesday I was fried from the busy four-day weekend, so it wasn't until last night that I actually got those changes (mostly) into the manuscript. I'm hoping to get the rest of the basic details nailed down tonight, and then spend next week-ish working on the key scenes. I'm at a place where I can start posting wordcounts again.

Also, I'm finally getting my brain wrapped around the Origins LARP. I've been letting it sit in the back of my head while I focused on other projects, but now that Awakening is done on my end (save for the final read-through of the layout, which will happen later) and Digital Dirge doesn't feel like I'm trying to pass a boulder, there's enough brainspace freed up. I'm probably going to bounce some basic ideas off my design team to get the core plot hammered out and figure out minimum character requirements before we go into characters and setting details.

So, my "vacation" was a lot of hard work for me, but I sure feel a lot better.

While I still have to do a few more things (like work on some forms and handouts), the rest is done. I just emailed off the latest draft of Awakening to White Wolf.

I may take a day or two off, before diving back in to Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. I think I earned a short break.

I unexpectedly got a lull in my workday, so I can properly update.

Last night was the first round of draft three copy edits, working very late with banzaigrrl (I didn't get to bed until midnight). Cut some brilliant sentences like "All things being equal, this wouldn't be the case. But things are not all equal." Also cut a few bad references and some excessive p. xx cross-references (stuff like referencing the section you JUST READ or sections that no longer exist). Debated some Latin and Greek translations, boiled down some wordy sections to their significant points, and generally tightened up the manuscript. Tonight I have to rewrite some sections that weren't a quick fix, and Wednesday we do it all again. If all goes well, I should have it ready for WW line edits in a week (which will be two weeks ahead of deadline).

Some people might be wondering why I'm editing it before I send it to the editors at White Wolf. Well, there are two kinds of editing in my mind -- line editing and copy editing. Line edits are grammatical or style edits you run into: put a comma here, change the spelling of this word, italicize this word, and so on. Despite what your high school teacher told you, a chunk of English grammar is more subject to personal opinion than iron-clad rules. While I've done everything I can to keep to the writer's guidelines, it makes sense to leave line-editing to in-house editors who are far more familiar with the WW style of writing than I am. Also, having never worked with WW editors before, I didn't know if there would be copy edits as well, but for my first major manuscript it made sense to reduce the need for it as much as possible.

Meanwhile, copy edits are based on content: make this clearer, revise this sentence, move this section to later in the book, and the like. While it's possible to do this remotely with notes and emails, it's hard to have a conversation about nitpicky points of style and intent or twenty-minute conversations on the difference between "talon" and "hoof." I've found it's more productive to give the editor the manuscript, leave her alone for a couple of weeks, and then sit down with a laptop and talk through all the concern areas. With banzaigrrl, most times we're on the same page -- she notices things I would have changed if I had noticed them. Sometimes she totally blindsides me with some brilliant way to make a clunky section much more elegant. Sometimes she or I find something that doesn't flow well, and we brainstorm ideas until we come up with something we both like. Very rarely will I veto something she suggests, and she trusts my instincts when I do.

Maybe I've been very lucky, but I haven't had the experience of dreading my editor. On the contrary, I adore a good editor that can point out clunky sections and say "Hey, fix this." I don't believe in trying to please everyone who doesn't like something you're written, but any writer who tries to write something and then won't let another living soul critique their work is either a genius or a fool (and my money's on "fool"). A good editor, a good person to brainstorm ideas with, and a couple of trusted readers who will honestly and fairly critique your work are invaluable tools to any writer.

3,292 / 20,000 (16.5%)

Again, I'm still at the stage of nailing down the skeleton. I figured out one vector, but the other one just wasn't working out right for some reason, and I spent the past couple of days just thinking about it and kind of avoiding any serious writing on it. I finally talked it over with greebotrill, and she pointed out that I needed a third vector to make it all hang together. We discussed ideas, and after hastily jotting down some notes it all clicked into place. I discarded chunks of my original idea, and rearranged some other pieces to accommodate the third vector. Now I'm going to sit on it for a while and see how that gels in my head - I have a Mage LARP to run tomorrow, and Monday is editing for draft three of MET: Awakening, so I'll have a few days to let it sit in the back of my head before I come back to it and start fleshing out details.

Friday: Dealt with annoying meeting scheduling at work, came home to work on initial research for the Origins LARP and Sekrit Project Digital Dirge, ran an IRC scene with a dead PC (don't ask), and worked out again for 15 minutes.

Saturday: Did some more reading and research on Digital Dirge, asked a whole bunch of questions, went shopping with greebotrill, and helped her with putting up blinds in my office. Then cleaned up and rearranged the office a bit. greebotrill slipped and fell down the stairs (she's okay, but it sounded really terrible), and the motherboard on garchangel's computer started to go bad. Ended up eating Mexican food twice and playing a pretty bad XBox 360 game before giving up after about 15 minutes.

Sunday: More reading and research on Digital Dirge, and helped run a few errands before heading off to the monthly D&D game, where we discussed how many enemies we had made, buried someone's balls and avoided a lot of lizardmen. Stayed after to be social for a while, then headed home.

On the surface, it appears pretty mundane, but the fact is that this is the first time in a while that I haven't been sick or busy with something involved MET: Awakening (or, most of the time, both).

* Started working out again (now that my body is finally letting me). I counted all the lifting, walking and stair-climbing on Monday as a cardio workout, and I did 15 minutes on Tuesday. I skipped Wednesday to break it up, and got up to 15 minutes yesterday before my ear started to hurt, so I stopped. My hope is to get up to at least 30 minutes by the end of the month, if not back to my original time of 40-45 minutes.

* Saw the dentist. Nothing's going wrong there. The hygienist gave me some suggestions to help with my tender gums, which I'll start implementing.

* Finished draft two of MET: Awakening last night. It clocked in at just under 202,000 words, which is 17,000 over. Over the next couple of weeks I plan to sit down with my personal editor to deal with problems and improvements I'm just not seeing, and maybe tweak a few things to get a couple thousand more words lopped off. Or just delete all uses of the word "the."

* Somewhere in the next week or so, I have to start two new projects: hammering out details for the Origins one-shot LARP, and 20,000 words on another project I'm currently calling Sekrit Project Digital Dirge. I also really need to finish reading a manuscript that's been sitting on my desk for weeks now.

* monkeegoth called to let me know that his second son, Grayson, was born and that they were home and okay. It was good to hear that everything was fine, and I'm looking forward to another opportunity to spend time at Casa del Connelly.

* Played Awakening on IRC last night, and we discovered that three WW freelancers in the same game gives you egg rolls, or possibly spare ribs. I'm still not finding my stride with Chance, but I think that's because I've played him entirely online, which is a medium I'm not totally familiar with (I usually use online gaming to supplement other games). Had to bail out halfway through to pick up dinner, and then got distracted by an OOC conversation about mechanics before I went to bed. There were some disagreements, but I got to flesh out some of my ideas on core resolution and the interaction between rules and story in MET. I may toss it into my notes for a theoretical MET 2.0 (i.e., "shit I considered shoehorning into MET: Awakening").

* I've also been starting to do email scenes with my Requiem PC, since I haven't seriously been playing him since December, and I don't think I've played him in LARP since November. The Gangrel Drama flows, and it is good.

* I haven't played World of Warcraft for a couple of weeks now. I logged in a couple nights ago, started a quest, died, and logged off. My attention will come back around to it, I'm sure, but right now I'm just not into it.

* We got plans for Wrestlemania 23 sorted out, making it as cheap as possible while still getting greebotrill back for classes on Monday. I, however, am taking that Monday off. We've decided that it'll be an early anniversary gift to each other, because we're huge dorks. greebotrill is also debating going to a dig Mexico for a couple of weeks for school (needed for her human anthropology degree). I'm very proud at how far she's come in her schooling!

* Electrician fixed the problem. Turns out that a screw wasn't tightened down, causing a key wire to corrode and fail, taking out a bunch of stuff with it. We got the entire thing replaced so that another portion of our house electrical system is now up to code. But, we basically paid over $900 for a screw. [insert prostitution joke here]

* Moved into my new office and unpacked. My cube is very spacious, bigger even than some of the manager's actual offices. And I have a window. There is much cube-envy in the office. However, I'm not used to having co-workers around.

* Finished up Chapter Four, so I only have one more chapter to go and then draft 2 will be done. Then it's a final rewrite, and off to the editors.

* And now, catching up on the work I had to postpone from all the packing, moving and unpacking.

My head has been stuck in the work/writing/sleep cycle for so long that I realized I haven't actually updated. Here are the high points:

* Car engine (the new car) died last Thursday. We managed to limp it to the Mazda dealership, which has an Enterprise rental kiosk right there. Mazda covered the rental car while they looked at it.

* Saw Ghost Rider and The Prestige over the weekend. I was surprised that I actually enjoyed GR -- I expected it to suck, and while it wasn't great cinema (or even as good as, say, Spider-Man, and had a few plot holes you could drive a truck through), I did enjoy it. The Prestige was really entertaining as well.

* Monday sucked. I had a doctor's appointment in the morning and my boss was off that day, so I just slept in. This resulted in me not being able to find the rental car key, failing to disarm the alarm on the other car, having to dig for the keys and alarm fob for said other car, losing and finding my parking pass, and ultimately having to reschedule my appointment. So....

* ... I went on Tuesday instead, after dealing with an obnoxious doctor (at the med school, not my doctor). My left ear (i.e., not the one operated on) has been hurting for the past couple of weeks. I am on medication to help that, but it flared back up on Tuesday. Turns out the eardrum is so plastered down over my inner ear bones that it's formed a seal over my inner ear canal. He's put me on a short dose of steroids, in the hopes that it will clear up and avoid yet another surgery. He also admitted that my ear is probably the most challenging ear he's had to operate on in his twenty years of practice, which is why he tries to reserve such operations as a last resort. I jokingly offered to be the subject of a paper. He might take me up on it.

* Found out yesterday that the problem was that the oil-change place put the wrong weight of oil in, even though it's clearly listed on the oil cap. Ergo, we need a new engine. Since we're covered and it isn't our fault, we aren't paying for it. I suspect, however, that Jiffy Lube will be paying for our new engine.

* Got the steroid scrip yesterday. These are mean -- I have to take 6 pills today, 5 tomorrow, 4 the next day, etc. until they're gone. If I miss one, it could have serious side effects. Also, I'm more susceptable to illness during this time. So, yes, I'm still not well. At this rate, I suspect I'll be actually healthy about the time MET Awakening is released. Speaking of...

* Got the final rules comments in, and made the last revisions. Now I'm in the edit phase, which is simultaneously easier and harder than I expected. It's easier because I realized in order to keep to my deadlines I have to ignore some of the small-scale polishing I would like to do and focus on larger issues like continuity and flow, proper capitalization of words, consistancy of terminology, as well as cutting unimportant or redundant words. Plus, something I thought I would have to do I might not have to do after all. It's harder because even those things take up a lot more of my time than I anticipated. I could half-ass it and save myself some time, but I don't want to. (Of course, once my final deadline approaches, what I want isn't so important anymore, so that's something else I have to balance -- what edits matter as opposed to what edits only drive me crazy.)

* I will be so happy when my assistant Storytellers can take over some of my paperwork. Seriously.

* I have my weekly WoW game tonight. That's positive.