Category: Uncategorized

It’s Tim Powers’s World, We Just Live In It

Posted on by eidolon

This probably won’t make much sense to people who haven’t read the Tim Powers novels The Stress of Her Regard and its fantastic brand-new sequel, Hide Me Among the Graves.  Especially the latter.

But.

Remember that time when I almost got caught in a ghost trap straight out of a Powers novel, and I started to wonder if maybe I wasn’t a real person but instead a character in a book?

And remember that time when somebody found a pair of handcuffs buried along the foundation of my house?

Yeah, well, it’s happening again.

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First Draft Down…

Posted on by eidolon

I finished the first draft of SOMETHING MORE THAN NIGHT this evening.  Hooray!

It’s very exciting, typing up the final pages of a manuscript.  Granted, this is only the fourth time I’ve done it.  But it’s still a happy thrill.  I hope it never loses its appeal.

There’s still so much work left to do on this thing…like make it coherent, and readable, and perhaps even find a way to make it not suck.  But that’s rewriting.  Rewriting is almost always less taxing than writing.  At least now I have something to hammer on, rather than a blank page.  But that’s a task to tackle another day.

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An Open Letter to the People on my Bus

Posted on by eidolon

Hello, my dear fellow bus riders!

What a lovely year we’re enjoying on the bus stop, no?  This February, the temperature never hit the -20s, like it did last year.  This March, the wind didn’t blow 60 miles per hour for a month straight.  And we’re getting rain in April!  Which makes everything smell so lovely, thanks to the water in the air and the blossoms on the fruit trees.  This is a wonderful time of year to be riding the bus, to get to spend those few wonderful minutes outdoors every morning and evening. 

We’re a smart bunch, aren’t we? 

And yet…

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The Final Approach

Posted on by eidolon

I’m nearing the end of the first draft of Something More Than Night.  I’ve just begun what will be, I think, the final scene.  I’m very pleased.  So now I’m at that phase where I look ahead to the second draft and think: ugh.

This book is very different from my other novels, not only in terms of story, characters, and world, but also in terms of how I’ve approached the writing.  I outlined this one just as much as the others—the 4′ x 3′ corkboard in my office is completely covered with notecards—and yet this book lent itself to far more improvisation and in-the-moment reinvention along the way. Which sounds strange, when I hear myself say it, because I hewed more closely to the outline for this book than I did to any of the original outlines for the Milkweed books. 

But the rewriting for this second draft will have a different focus, a different goal, than it did on any of the Milkweed books.

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