Well, damn. It's a book.

Well, damn.

Gargoyle Dreams has turned into a book.  I'm at 30K words, and I haven't even crossed the continental divide yet.

I had a great time writing a chapter yesterday.   To see a scene come alive, fully formed, characters and setting and dialogue, is an amazing thing.  A miracle of life.  A fictional life, maybe, but it feels alive to me.

It's this that I'm most grateful about.  That periodically my stories come alive, as real to me as anything.  I don't know whether my talent is small or large or somewhere in-between, but just having this happen is a blessing.

I mean, I struggle more often than not.  But then I'll have one of those moments, and everything else drops away and nothing else matters.

I have no doubt whatsoever that this is what I should be doing.

This is the true success of my writing.  This is the true reward.

Okay, enough of the sappy.

I'm supposed to get The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murders back from Lara, my editor, tomorrow.  I'll be interested in what she thinks of it.  Especially what she thinks of the subject matter.

Lara is turning her attention to Tuskers III after that.  I figure that will need another rewrite when I get it back, and I want to clear the decks for that.

Anyway, I figure I'll finish Gargoyle Dreams through July, then turn my attention to edits of The Last Fedora and The Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murders. 

At some point in the next month of so, I'll have 4 books finished: two first drafts, and two first drafts plus edits.  I would kind of like to give the first drafts plus edits one more fleshing out.  That's the work part.  The part I have to force myself to do, but which makes the books better.  I need to grow up and do that.

I've gotten to a certain level of competence, and I need to knuckle down and work on making them just a little bit better, if possible.

It's fine line between making them better and fucking them up, though.  So I'm going to be trying to thread that.

Meanwhile, the changes that Bren has suggested to Faerylander are so extensive (and rightfully so -- she is holding my feet to the fire) that I've pretty much concluded that I should try to cut the book in half.  Basically start all over.

Faerylander will become Faerylander and Zombielander, two different books.

An ambitious project that I'm putting off for now, because I need to write Tuskers IV as well as the The Darkness You Fear, which is my new Virginia Reed novel.

Just need to be diligent and get these things done.  (And still allow myself to write new books as new ideas come along...such as The Last Fedora and TMPDGM and Gargoyle Dreams.)

When did this turn into a job?  Remember the above Joy.