Hello! It’s easy to see, I’ve been quiet here on WordPress for awhile. Well, I’ve been working on stuff in the background, so I thought I’d post an update:

Reality Check – It took months, but I inched my way through my latest novel’s draft and edited basic English stuff, hunted down and slaughtered instances of passive voice, and subtly changed the text to guide the ending to be more what I want it to be. I finished the existing chapters, and then hit a block, since a new ending requires a chapter or three added onto the end. I broke this block on Monday and Tuesday, and have a shiny new chapter done. I’m happy with it, and I’m pretty sure I have another couple of chapters to do before I’d call it done.  After that, as I said last time, I hope to find a publisher for this, my fifth novel!

NSSWW – Nindy Short Story Writing Week went very well! We all got to read 7 minutes of our stories (I didn’t even get halfway through mine) and voted on whose was the best. I got many votes and some encouraging comments, but my friend Johnna Murphy made us all laugh with her story, Table of the Gods, and won by a landslide. Three winners were given copies of The Apex Book of World SF, generously donated by Jason Sizemore, publisher of Apex. My critique group chewed over my story, Personal Space, gave useful feedback, and urged me to get it published. I plan to, as soon as I’m finished with Reality Check!

Mo*Con – I attended Mo*Con VII: Cinco de Mo*Yo, for my second year. This is a small but mighty convention of writers, editors, publishers and artists of mostly dark fiction who get together to talk about writing, the industry, spirituality, gender issues and sexuality. And much more, really. Our main guest of honor this year was Mary Robinette Kowal, novelist and professional puppeteer. And it was her puppeteer insight that amazed me… her analogy between how puppets are brought to life opened my eyes to how description and focus are used to show a character’s mind and interest. I visited with many friends at Mo*Con, and I made several new ones. We all missed Sara Larson.

Mean Spirit – Maybe if I put this in writing, it’ll help motivate me.  Before Reality Check, I’d started writing a sequel to Blue Spirit. I got a few chapters in before NaNoWriMo 2011 hit, and I have been busy editing and polishing and expanding Reality Check ever since. Once that’s out of the way, I’m going to dive back into this project. As a run up to it, I’ve been re-reading some of my other novels that feature characters that will be in the new novel, to reacquaint myself. I’d been reminded of things from the other novels recently by some friends reading them, and I’m surprised how much I’d forgotten. It’s been fun revisiting these. My hope is that this will help energize me to work on Mean Spirit, and will make it a richer novel.