They don't beat around the bush *grin* I'm going to have to start whacking your fingers if you don't stop putting commas before "as" - quote mnfaure And I remember jmeadows threatening to do something terrible to me if I didn't stop using semi-colons completely indiscriminately. I think, I've got the hang of it now, though. *waves to Jodi*

I finished (maybe that word should be in quotation marks) my Camelot Book in March 2006. For the last 15 months it's been sitting at a publisher who hasn't responded to a couple of queries I've sent out since the one year mark, so I decided to resume the Great Agent Hunt for the novel. Now, as I look over the book, I'm thinking "Maybe I should just completely eliminate the prologue except for the...

As widely meme'd: the fifteen Books which influenced me most, that I can quickly think of off the top of my head: 1. The Book of the Dun Cow, Walter Wangerin Jr. (not the ancient Irish manuscript) 2. The Towers of February, Tonke Dragt 3. The Book of the New Sun (series), Gene Wolfe 4. St. Teresa of Avila's autobiography 5. Ascent of Mt. Carmel, St. John of the Cross 6. The Lord of the Rings...

Searched to find how deep the world's deepest mines are, and was intrigued by these facts: from National Geographic The ambitious new mining projects [in South Africa] are "ultra-deep" mines with shafts that are deeper than 2.2 miles (3.5 kilometers) in the ground, where temperatures rise well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit (55 degrees Celsius) and rock shatters like glass. and from Yefim...

And candles! And all manner of good things for jmeadows - just remember to share some with the ferrets! Happy birthday! (I used to think the world was made up of people whose birthdays were in October and November. Who knew?)

Some things are hard to write about. I knew this intellectually ( jmeadows and others have written about it, and it's not hard for me to imagine), but I never experienced it myself, before. But you know something's difficult to write about if you manage to get a sentence down and then feel all nervous and walk away from your desk and then think of what's coming next and decide to put on laundry...

jmeadows  has a good post on line-editing yourself over here .

A post about the girl and boy who walked into my brain this morning and insist that they are not just darker versions of One Night and Once but entirely different people from an entirely different story -- any resemblance to other extant ideas being entirely coincidental. At first I thought they were post-apocalyptic too, but gradually I realised that it was a different kind of apocalypse to the usual...

As usual, several things on my mind leads me to post. 1. jmeadows used a phrase, "unless you've been living under a rock..." and I have. Her context was agentfail and queryfail. I haven't been spending much time online, as I have better things to do than trawl the Internets, so I missed the latest round of *fails. I'm glad I did. I'm sorry more people didn't. Sometimes I think I'm the only...

So this morning, I was explaining lawn darts (aka jarts, for those of us old enough to recollect when suburbanites used to engage in a form of retroactive birth control via lottery conducted by heavy metal projectiles.) to jmeadows , who is a little too young to remember them from before they were banned. And it tied into something cristalia  had mentioned a while back, about needing...