So, recently I lost a three-week-old puppy that I thought was going to make it, the only living puppy in his litter and a puppy for whom I had great hopes.  I probably don’t need to explain that this was a depressing and upsetting event.  My response, of course, was to reach for a Really Good Book I’d been looking forward to reading and some Extremely Good Very Dark Chocolate to go with it.

The Chocolate was Callebaut, which I mail order in large quantities, and the book was The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  Obviously the chocolate was outstanding, but even more important, the book was absolutely perfect for me right then.  This is one time I really agree with the idea of ‘escapism’ and ‘escapist literature.’

I’m not a huge big fan of dystopias generally because who needs to read about unhappy people living miserable, depressing lives?  Please, just spare me.

But the fact is, in The Hunger Games,you can tell that the good guys are going to win eventually.  I mean, in the first book, the happy ending will obviously be restricted and short-term, but still, you know right from the beginning that there *will* be at least a moderately happy ending.

And it was just as good as I’d hoped, too.  I mean, in the YA world recently, it’s seemed like everybody has been talking about this book; that’s why I reached for it when I needed a really good book.  And everybody was right!  It was great!  A very well written book about wonderful characters caught in a horrible situation that was MUCH MUCH WORSE than anything in my life, which was exactly what I needed.

Luckily I had the second book (Catching Fire) on hand.  I’d planned to wait to read any of them until the third book was out, but hey, it’s coming out in August, so close enough.  I’ve got it preordered.  Can’t wait to see the bad guys go down!

I’ve read a couple other books recently, too.  CJ Cherryh’s latest installment in her NEVERending Foreigner series (this one is called Deceiver).  I have to say, you’d think she’d manage to not end on a cliffhanger, yes?  But no.  Heck, we all know the series is not complete.  Just FINISH THIS BOOK before you publish it, is that too much to ask?  This one just ended smack in the middle of unrolling events.

Well, well . . . eventually the next book will be out and we can see Bren Cameron finesse the tense diplomatic situation he’s in and rescue Barb and so on.

Oh!  And I read the latest Beka Cooper book!  By Tamara Pierce.  You know, if you’ve read anything by Tamara Pierce and liked it but it was a little young for you?  The Beka Cooper books are a pretty huge step up in sophistication.  Really, really good characters and fantastic world building, substantially more depth than usual.  Amazing use of slang.  Love ’em.  I think anybody who enjoyed the Paksennarian books by Elizabeth Moon would love these.  Can’t wait for the third book.

What a great pity that not every publisher brings out all three books of a trilogy in the same year! (!!!)  I get that usually the author needs time to write the sequels, but still, having to wait and wait for a sequel makes me REALLY APPRECIATE Orbit’s emphasis on bringing out trilogies fast.

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So, I’ve been writing!

Well . . . pretty much.  More or less.  The puppies are distracting (though extraordinarily cute), but even MORE distracting is the sudden need to pick TEN MILLION plums, rinse and slice each one individually, and cook the resulting gallons and gallons of plum slices into pie filling to can.

And before the yellow plum (Shiro) is done, the purple Fortune and red Ozark Premier will be ready.  And the peaches!  I can’t even think how many peaches we’ll be picking this year! Barring hail like last year.

Summer would be a great time to lose that pesky five pounds, what with all that fresh fruit rolling in, except that fresh fruit has a strong tendency to turn into plum cobblers and peach pies and blackberry tarts and rhubarb ice cream (seriously!  Mmmm!  Rhubarb!), and somehow it’s more like a pesky eight pounds, now.

But along with the puppies (housetraining and crate training and socializing and playing with and just admiring), AND along with processing the abovementioned millions and millions of plums, I’m also writing.

I’ve worked out the plot of a new story!  Well, only part way, true, but a whole lot more than not at all, which was where I was plotwise this time two weeks ago.  Don’t know the ending.  Oh, well, that’s not true:  of course I know the ending!  I just don’t know exactly HOW the good guys will win, if by ‘exactly’ you mean ‘at all’.  But at least I’m now clear about the overall problem the good guys will be facing, and some of the complications.

Part of what you do when building a story, you know, is increase the tension?  By dropping your main characters into a hole?  And then digging the hole deeper?

So what I know now is the shape of the hole.  What I don’t yet know is a)  what will happen to make it deeper, b) and deeper, c) and deeper, and d) how to get my good guys out of the hole at the end.

But that is fine!  I never know all that stuff to begin with!  As I work my way through the, uh, late beginning of the story and into the middle, the stuff toward the end will become clear.  Besides, I am exaggerating:  I do know SOME of the complications that will make for a deep, deep hole.

But here, for me, is one big advantage of having written more than one (or two) books in the past:  I KNOW that the plot will work itself out for me.  It always does!  So it’s okay not to know what the climactic scene will involve; I know it’ll be there when I get to it.  Then a little touching up through the whole manuscript makes it look to the reader like I knew right from the beginning what the end would be, or so I fondly believe.  Which, out of, um, counting the unpubished stories . . . would be . . . ah, I think I knew more or less the entire plot of two out of nine finished novels at the time I started writing it.  So for me that is the exception rather than the rule.

So, how long will it take to finish my current project?  I would like this to be a rather short novel, say 300 pages.  What is that, 90,000 words or so?

Quick quiz question:  if you write four pages a day, how long will it take to write 300 pages?  Answer:  not long, if you don’t get distracted by your puppies or home orchard and actually sit down and stick to that schedule.  The whole POINT of barely working in the summer is to make time for . . . well, other kinds of work.  So any day now!  Four pages a day!

I will say, though, that for Book Three of The Griffin Mage Trilogy, I wrote almost exactly a hundred pages more than appeared in the final version.  Secondary goal for current project:  don’t do that again.

So how about the current project?  What is it?  I’m thinking it will be a YA fantasy.

Oh!  And by the way, I read this snippet someplace that advised writers never to start a story with dialog.  Well, whatever!  Here’s how I started my most recent project:

* * *

“They say the Lord is dying,” Tassel said, swinging without ceremony into the bakery kitchen.  She let the door slam shut behind her.  It banged hard because its frame had warped in the wet spring weather, an event predictable as the blooming of crocuses and daffodils.  The bell chimed, once and again and a third time as the door bounced against the frame.  The chime was a bright cheerful sound, but it reminded Keri that she needed to hire someone to replace the warped boards.

Keri’s mother could have got out a hammer and a handful of twopenny nails and fixed the doorframe herself.  If Keri tried to do that, she would probably bend all the nails and crack the doorframe and knock the head off the hammer.  But since her mother’s death, the bakery never seemed to earn enough in a week to pay a carpenter to repair the door, so from week to week the door continued to bang in its frame.

Keri sighed, shrugged, and kept her attention on the immediate task facing her – one she could at least address properly, and one that would earn decent coin.  Maybe this cake would even pay for a carpenter at last.

Tassel watched critically as Keri piped cream frosting around the circumference of a cake layer and then spread peach jam over the layer. “Did you hear what I said?”

Keri produced a wordless murmur, more interested in keeping the peach jam from oozing out of bounds than in Tassel’s far-from-surprising news.  She placed a second cake layer on top of the first and repeated the piped circle of frosting and filling of peach jam.

“Yes, but my cousin says you can stand in his back pasture and actually watch the boundary mist thinning,” Tassel persisted.  Her voice dropped portentously.  “He says, some days lately, you can see right out across the border.  He says you’d swear you can glimpse the tips of mountains against the sky.”

“Um?” said Keri.  She placed the third layer on top of the second and began to spread frosting in large swirls across the sides and top of the towering cake.

Tassel clicked her tongue in exasperation.  “Not Gannon, and not Timon either.  It’s Cort who says he’s seeing mountaintops through the mist.”

Her attention momentarily captured, Keri glanced up.  She tried to imagine Tassel’s most humorless cousin standing in his back pasture, gazing into the border of the Demesne and frightening himself with vague shapes in the mist.  Her imagination failed her.  “So what else does Cort say?”

“Only what I told you.  But if it’s true, doesn’t it mean the Lord must really be dying this time?”

* * *

And, of course, he is, with all kinds of repercussions for Keri and everyone else.

I have 20,000 words written now, give or take a couple thousand.  Mind-boggling to consider that this should be something like 1/4 of the total length.  Well, we’ll see.  It would be very nice if this story cooperated with my idea of its proper length.

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So, this is exciting! Just got the final proofs for The Floating Islands, which is coming out next year, which is fine and good because I have plenty of time right now to work on this and I always kind of enjoy doing it and I can feel virtuously occupied without having to do, you know, real work.

But also! The cover proofs for the paperback edition of The City in the Lake arrived!

Now, the hardback cover sort of grew on me and I really do like it — here it is:

City in the Lake Hardcover

See? Evocative, and you can see what the title is about, and I like the way the cat is stepping down to the bridge. But the fact is, I always LOVED the first idea for the cover — and that is what Knopf has decided to use for hte paperback! I couldn’t be more pleased! Take a look:

City in the Lake Paperback

Isn’t that lovely?

Seeing the final proof of a new cover is always wonderful, and I’ve been really lucky — I’ve seen PLENTY of book covers I dislike and some I hate, but I really like all of mine. My favorite of the griffin covers at the moment is the one for Book 3, but I am SO outvoted — virtually everybody else I’ve asked loves the first cover the best (two of my friends vote for the simplicity of Book 2). I don’t know — I like the faintly wistful expression of the woman from Book 3. Must be something about wistfulness, because that’s a quality I see — and love — in the cover above, too.

Okay! Back to the final proofs for The Floating Islands! Last chance to catch typos and fix details I suddenly notice are all wrong . . .

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It’s been an intense month, as Adora’s litter turned out to be one premature half-sized little puppy who embarked immediately on a roller coaster: He’ll be fine! Wait, I think he’s going to die! Oh, whew, he’s okay. No, what? What? Aspiration pneumonia?

Aspiration pneumonia happens when a neonatal puppy breathes milk into his lungs, and it is always very serious.

Well . . . after putting the poor little guy on every safe and at least one risky antibiotic and tube-feeding him every four hours around the clock . . . he got better! And then he aspirated again and died anyway. Didn’t quite make it to four weeks old.

So that was brutal and explains why I haven’t been updating my website. I was hoping for better news when I got to it, you know?

Plus I discovered — I bet this won’t surprise anybody — that a violent emotional roller coaster is not conducive to writing! I got almost nothing done over the past month, other than dusting the whole house and becoming a world-class expert on tube-feeding tiny puppies.

In happier puppy news: Bree’s puppies, at least, are fine! Nothing cuter than five-week-old Cavalier puppies. Here’s her little boy puppy, and the two little girls sleeping in their ‘den’. I’m keeping both girls, at least long enough to see how they turn out.

People ask me, Isn’t it really hard to sell a puppy and let it go to a new home? And the answer is, No, not really, as long as you’re perfectly certain the new home is excellent. It is way, way worse to lose one after his eyes are open and he starts to have a personality. It is just fine to send one away as long as you get happy notes back from the new owner about how perfect and great the puppy is!

So I have these two stories started, you know, and wasn’t really able to work on either of them over the past few weeks. That’ll change, and I’ll pick one soon and get some major writing done. Why else arrange to be so very, very part time in the summer except to have time for writing? But first!

I’m kinda thinking of working the whole dying-puppy thing into a novel. So it wouldn’t be a total waste, you know? And as kind of a memorial to the one who didn’t make it. I trust that doesn’t strike anybody as stupidly sentimental. (If it does, keep your opinion to yourself.)

I kind of think I know what I might do as far as the plot goes, more or less, and I have this kinda snazzy setting in mind, so I think maybe I’ll see if I can’t write thirty or forty pages of that first and then think about which story to actually finish. I will turn the puppy from a spaniel into some other kind of creature . . . maybe a griffin (not a fire-griffin, though! Different world!). And, I promise you, he will SURVIVE. Depressing endings, faugh. Bad enough in the real world.

So, anyway, after the puppy died, I made a large plate of The Best Cookies In The World and got out a book I’ve been longing to read (The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins, which I was saving to read until the third book came out, which it isn’t yet, but August is close enough) and read the book and ate all the coookies. The book was perfect for the occasion. Absorbing story, you know, and all the characters have way worse problems than I do, which at the moment I really appreciate. I totally get why this book garnered such raves all last year! I read Catching Fire, too, and now I’m dying to read the third book. Can’t wait to see the evil Capital pulled down. I hope all the good guys survive to dance on its grave, or at least all my favorite characters, because seriously, I am in the mood for happy endings.

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