We have this hallway at work, lined with corkboard message boards on one side where Leadership pins up notes and cards they've received from various ministries thanking us or telling about some story or event or...you know. Whatever. The wind from my passage knocked one of these cards to the ground, so I went back to re-pin it. It was from a ministry called "France for Christ".

Today is Bastille Day.

Ladies and Gentleman, I take this as a clear sign that the time has come to overthrow the Church. I'll set up a meeting in Exchange, maybe line up some action items. We'll get an agenda together. We have to advance it.

Sorry for the delay, folks. Work is a verah srs environment, and I'm in a cubicle, and they block a lot of sites. Not twitter, surprisingly, and not blogger or livejournal. But I've been busy enough that I haven't really explored the tolerances of the filter. Anyway. I'll try to update this thing more frequently.

Some thoughts about the new job. First of all, I'm glad I'm here. I'm glad I made the move. I went from an environment where I pretty much knew everything and had no interest in expanding my responsibilities, to an environment where I know a lot about a tiny aspect of the job, and there's a lot of room for improvement and involvement. And I'm finally using SQL, though sparingly. My responsibilities in that area will evolve, and I'll learn as I go because I'll *have* to learn just to stay afloat. It's a nice change.

Also, people here care about their jobs. That's new.

And writing is progressing. I've been asked to provide character descriptions and sample chapters for the cover artist. I won't tell you who it is, because I'm not sure how final it is and I'd like the final product to be something of a surprise, but I'm happy. I'm about halfway through chapter four. I think I finally found the voice for the book last night. Not to say that the bits written are bad, but they're a little unfocused. This is why I handwrite draft zero. The creative process works better for me with pen and ink, and we're still very much in the creative part of this project. But last night I wrote a dialogue between Eva and the Elder Alexander, and it just...it was right. It's still funny to me that I so often find the groove for a work in dialogue, when what drew me to writing was descriptive prose. We develop, my friends. We grow. I'll probably finish out chapter four, write the prologue (or probably the opening to chapter one) that I've been kicking around since I envisioned the character but didnt' want to write until I really had a handle on her, the Cult of the Warrior, and the world. And I have that handle now. Anyway. It's going well.

Well, Lou has the news.
pyrsf.blogspot.com/2009/06/youre-going-to-love-eva-forge.html

I just want to say what a thrill it is to work with Lou, and to be published with Pyr. I've known Brother Anders for a number of years now, and his philosophies of publication have done much to inform my own writing zen. This is going to be a brilliant thing, my pretties. Beautiful words. You're gonna love it.

Soon as I write it. Heh.

This is the third day since my departure was announced to the front office. Three days I was supposed to spend answering questions and helping my coworkers get ready for the transition. Here's what's happened so far:

1)My coworker has spent most of that time training someone else to do his job. He basically expects to dump most of the work onto this person. Which, I believe, is exactly what will happen.

2)I have done no training of anyone. Theoretically that's no big deal, because this guy is supposed to be able to do my job when I'm on vacation. Trick is, he's demonstrated time and time again that he can't do my job when I'm gone. Again, after the 12th it's not really my problem.

3)They still haven't announced it to production. I don't know why. It's awkward.

4)I serve as CSR for a handful of clients. I was told to not contact any of them, that my boss will be taking over those accounts and he'll handle the transition. Some of these guys are submitting jobs and I am technically coordinating, but they'll be mailing after I leave. I'm trying to get my boss to deal with these things but he's just not willing. It's weird. I think he should interact with these people as soon as possible. He's only told people he absolutely has to tell. I've tried to talk to him about upcoming jobs and client patterns, but he just doesn't want to hear it.

I can't figure it out. But then again, there are a lot of things that they do that just boggle the mind, so I guess this is nothing new. In fact, this is pretty much why I'm leaving. At least they're consistent.

Book news, book news. The new book is going well. I wrote a lot last night. I've just been cutting off chapters where I felt it was appropriate for the narrative flow, but that's ending up with some inconsistent lengths and, frankly, some very short chapters. We'll have to see if that reworks itself as I go along. I have also removed guns but kept cog-driven carriages and monotrack railroads. Also turbine driven flight packs. And the magic is fun to write. I just hope it's not too confusing.

This isn't that big of a thing, but it made me happy so I thought I'd share. Locus does a listing of all the forthcoming books, separated into US and UK. There's a complete list of books by publisher, with the title, author and month of publication. Before that they do a listing of selected books by author, which tends to be your bigger names and anticipated releases. At the top of the first page of this feature they put thumbnails of some of the covers of the forthcoming books. So in the US section I'm under the complete listing, though oddly enough it lists Oct '09, when the catalog shows it as Sept 29th. Well, that's practically October, so I guess that's no big deal.

But in the UK forthcoming books section, I made the "Selected Books by Author" listing *and* the thumbnails at the top. I'm sure this has as much to do with Jon Foster's brilliant cover as it does my brilliant novel, but it's good to see some coverage within the industry. Some small part of my fragile ego was worried that the book would appear and then pass without comment through the public's conscience.

For kicks, here are the other books that got the cover-as-thumbnail treatment in the UK section: Stephen Baxter, Robin Hobb, Terry Prachett, Kim Stanley Robinson, Neal Asher, Kristin Cashore and Steven Erikson. If you don't know who any of those people are, you should look them up. Oh, and then there's this Tim Akers punk.

I guess the fact that I appeared in the UK section just further confirms the fact that I'm a famous (American-born) British author. And it sure is a pretty cover.

Well, I just served my two weeks notice at my job. I've been here for almost twelve years. Anyone who reads this blog knows that I haven't been happy for a while, so I'm relieved to be moving on. At the same time, it's a big step. I don't know how my new job (of course I have another job lined up. Good lord.) will interfere with my writing schedule. Hopefully not at all. Hopefully it won't be a transition fraught with stress and peril. Hopefully I'll just be able to slip into it and keep moving. We'll see.

Anyway. I'll whine more about how many words I've written or what narrative block I'm tangling with later on. For now, I'm just glad to be mobile. And I'm looking forward to looking forward to my job again. We'll see how long it lasts.

There is a piece of dental floss in the middle of the hallway of my office. It's been there for a little over a week. It's in such a position that every employee walks over it several times a day. It got there because someone flossed their teeth in their office (nice) and then threw it away, and the guy who empties the trash did a poor job of it and it fell out. I haven't touched it because it's become an interesting social experiment for me. How filthy will this place get before the bosses will do something about it? My guess is "Quite".

Well, the shower is now functional. The tiles weren't properly affixed on the floor, and water was getting down there and washing out the grout. They had to tear out part of the floor and re-tile it, but everything seems to be working properly. I'm relieved.

This year is going by so quickly. I had expected to be most of the way through the second Veridon book by now. There are obvious reasons that hasn't happened, but I'm having serious trouble starting this other book. I keep changing my mind about it. I must have written chapter one three different times, for three entirely different books. The problem is that none of the things I've written so far particularly interest me. That's no good. Too many other frustrations and distractions to really settle down. Doing this as a second job really is kind of a bitch.

Anyway. It's May. Three months until the UK release. And since the US release isn't until the end of September, it's practically five months until I'll see it on local store shelves. What can I do in five months?

Why are book endings so hard? So often I'll be reading a book, happily exploring the world that the author has created, and then some rogue plotline comes tumbling out of the underbrush and plows through everything and then we're sliding down a scree of bad dialogue and awkward coincidence and it's just...frustrating. This book I just stopped reading held a lot of promise, and it's done well commercially, but the ending is just a shambles. Very disappointed.

I don't claim to be any kind of solution to this. People contact me to say they're X far through the book and gosh they love it and I would really have to jump off a bridge to ruin the book. And so far those people have been happy with the ending of HoV, but I want to be clear. A book is a complete package. If you like the whole thing but didn't like the ending, you didn't like the book. In the same way, you should never force your way through a book you're not enjoying just because the ending *might* justify it. Toss it. Tell your friends to not read it. It's the only way to get authors to write better books.

I had a pretty good weekend. On Saturday my wife and I went to fly a kite. Our town is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and as part of that they organized an attempt at breaking a world record for most people flying kites. We were shooting for 1000, had 1100 sign up, but the wind sucked and it sounds like we only managed about 800 at the critical moment of counting. That's okay, though. We had fun.

The only thing that sucked about this weekend was that we broke our shower again. Well, not exactly. Turns out the contractor used the wrong kind of grout on the floor tiles in the shower, and it all washed out, so now the tiles are loose. They came by today, had a "d'oh" moment, and will be re-grouting our shower tomorrow sometime.

I spent a lot of time working on an outline for the next book thing. I have publishers asking for this thing, but I don't want to distribute outlines that aren't up to my potential. If that makes sense. So I'm still polishing it. I originally started the project thinking I would write a grand old epic fantasy, but I'm pretty sure I'm not cut out for such a thing. What I've ended up with is.... what? Epic fantasy cut with urban fantasy wrapped in steampunk and shot through with crime noir. Something like that. Mostly I'm just not letting myself be bound by old conventions. I want there to be elevated trains. I want the city to float. I don't want mounts, mounted combat or electricity. I don't want the main character to have to travel as part of her quest. I don't want quests. I want a single POV character. I want people in normal clothes, but also armor, but also sunglasses. I want punks with guns. I want a paladin with a double handed sword, incanting the rites of her dead god as she runs through the rain, chased by some kind of clockwork beastie. I want a drowned goddess floating through sewers. I want airships powered by tornadoes.

Anyway. It's going to be interesting.