Lots of progress. It’s the 28th, and I still expect to finish this basic revision this month. Yay! Today I should finish revising Ch. 21, tomorrow I should be able to finish up Ch. 22, and that’s it!
Well, sort of it: I have a dozen notes to myself to fix things related to continuity, to add a minor character to one scene where her absence doesn’t make sense, to possibly write a very short Ch. 8 — right now there is a two-paragraph placeholder in that spot, but I think it may need to expand to at least a few pages.
Then I really should re-read right from the top and see if I can knock another 10% off the length. I think most book-length works are improved by a 10% cut. This is still going to be a long one at that point, but not insanely long. I am now saying to myself, “Self, if the INDA books could run 600 pages each (or whatever), then KEHERA can run close to 500 pages.”
Right?
Anyway, then I guess I need to think of a somewhat less stupid title and hand it off to be read by someone other than me. My goal is to have this completely ready for that by the end of the week.
THEN I will need to re-orient myself toward my NEXT work-in-progress. Which, yay!, means taking a week to read things I didn’t write, in order to knock myself away from April’s obsessive focus on KEHERA.
But what?
The Goblin Emperor, that’s a good possibility. I would like to finish Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy — I want to start back at the beginning and re-read the first book, though. I could read Cherryh’s latest Foreigner installment. I could also finally read Wein’s Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire. It’s hard to decide, it really is.
But I know I will wind up by re-reading McKinley’s Chalice, because that is the tone I want to capture for my upcoming project. I probably won’t, exactly, but that’s the tone I want in my head when I pick my WIP back up.
Funny Supernatural Short Stories I have read.
The ur-story is “Boobs” by Suzy McKee Charnas. It gets teenage hormones and feminist revenge fantasy all in one tasty package. Mmmm Liver om-nom-nom. (Kindle edition not available, but it’s in lots of anthologies.)
Recently I picked up <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Undead-Philosophy-101-Stephanie-Burgis-ebook/dp/B007VFGNDK/"Undead Philosophy 101 by Stephanie Burgis, which is a nice take on the Vampires at School trope. It is a bit similar to Buffy Meets Twilight and is very well done.
I’m now reading Equoid by Charley Stross. It’s the first of the Laundry series that I really liked. The novels are a bit heavy handed because of their length; the shtick is absolutely perfect for a novelette. I can easily see this winning a Hugo.
Any other suggestions? It’s a very fruitful genre.
Nevada Barr comes close in GDMFSOB, but that’s more straight up feminist revenge porn. Fun, but needz moar zombies.