News

Me, again. First let me thank everyone that e-mailed, or wrote in, to let me know not to let some of the publicity get me down. Thanks.
Second, let’s talk about the event in Huntington Beach, CA. It was wonderful, as always. Chara the manager always runs a very smooth ship. It’s one of the reasons that we’ve been back to her store so many times. We saw a lot of familiar faces in the crowd. It’s been about three, or four years of going about once a year, or more, to this same area, so we learned that some people’s children had graduated from high school. Some fans had graduated from highschool, or moved, or were in college, or graduate school. Entire families of fans coming now that they’re kids are old enough to read all the books. Some people are married, celebrating anneverseries. Sort of like old home week, in a way. I know that some of you in other areas of the country are frustrated that we never visit your part of the world, but honestly the publisher picks the areas we are to visit. Our input mostly consists of what store in that area from a list that we’ve been given to choose from. One, the store needs to have enough space to hold that many people. We average around two hundred people per event, but it’s been over five hundred, and close to six before. That’s more unusual, but it happens. That’s a lot of people for a store to hold.
Since I lived in Los Angeles for about three years once upon a time, I’m usually not that impressed with the weather. I mean, one of the reasons I wanted to leave was I missed the seasonal changes. But it’s been an unusually cold and presistent winter here in St. Louis, and for the first time when Jonathon and I got off the plane, 70 degrees and that nice gentle air felt wonderful. For the first time in my life I understood why people take vacations to warm places in the middle of winter. Normally, I like winter, but I think almost everyone east of the Mississippi has had a little too much of it this year. Heck, I guess everyone east of the rockies.
But it wasn’t just the long winter that made L. A. seem more user friendly, it was that it was the beginning of tour, not the end. Usually we hit the west coast somewhere in the later part of a month long tour, and no city, no matter how lovely is lovely when you are two weeks or more into a plane a day, a city a day, and publicity all through it. My hat is off to all the actors and singers and comedians who do this kind of thing for months, or even years. All the performers who live more on the road than off, I do not know how you do it.
I begged off the big tour this time. Because it’s not just the month you loose, but weeks before in preperation, and weeks after in recovery. My husband and I always manage to be a little ill when we get back. Plane air, or the change in climate, or just a bug, who knows, but it happens darn near every time.
I’d love to visit every part of the country, and out of the country, that wanted me to come. If teleportation really worked, it might even be possible, but I am not one of those people who can work on tour. A little, a few notes, but not pages, and pages is what I need. Because pages will finish a book and notes won’ts. I’m still not finished with INCUBUS DREAMS. Until I finish it I cannot begin the next Merry book.
I’ve reached the point I reach with every book, I just want it to be done. No matter how much I enjoy the characters and the world my deadline looms, and is now in the rearview mirror, and the book is still not done. I finally realized that I’d been interrupted so many times by one thing or the other, mostly business related, that I had to get the last hundred pages and reread it. I couldn’t remember what we’d said, exactly what we’d done, so I had to back up. I hate doing that, because to me only pages count. Darla and Jonathon are both trying to get me to count the days when I make notes, or need to reread, or have to research, but it just isn’t real to me. Pages are real, pages count. I have a page count. I do not have an idea count, or a research count, or a I-can’t-remember-where-we-are count. But the gist of it all is this, about fifty pages need cut from the last hundred, because we repeat and wonder around too much.
You get Richard and Anita together and it gets wordy, or painful, or both. Add Jean-Claude and it takes time. But as I feared because I would go days without being able to write on the scene I had begun to repeat myself, or leave my outline further and further behind. So some major trimming and cut and paste to decide if this fact needs to stay, or this bit of dialogue, or if that is simply too cool to cut. Sometimes the really cool stuff gets cut anyway, but I mourn it more. Anything that makes me laugh outloud I try to keep in.
Some of the pages read incredibly well, and some of them, well, Jean-Claude got to say what I was thinking. “The two of you shall drive me to maddness.” (is that shall drive, or will drive, I’ll decide later.) His comment about Anita and Richard, and I whole-heartedly agree. But the three of them together on stage again was some of the funniest and most poignants moments yet, and that’s in a book that’s been pretty darn funny, and even more poignant. So it works, whether I agree with what we’re doing or not. (yes, I know that whether implies a choice so technically you don’t need to say, or not, but it always looks bare without it to me.)
As you can tell by my asides, I’m still thinking through grammar in this draft. If I really sweated grammar I could never do a blog entry again. I’ve got to get back to work, back to cutting and pasting, and whittling down this scene. I always have a scene in every book I’ve ever written that I call the-scene-that-would-not-die. It’s usually in the later half of the book, or at least a hundred and fifty pages, or more, in, and it’s a scene that just never seems to end. It usually averages between fifty and a hundred and fifty pages. At least half of it needs to be cut every damn time. Since I know that this happens every book, you’d think I’d get better at realizing that it is happening, thus preventing it, but there is something about that endless scene that is necessary for my process. Something shakes loose in all the stuff that needs trimming later, and the book usually goes along much faster and cleaner from that point on. I guess I can take courage from the fact that this is the scene, and once I’ve edited out some of the repitition and the stuff that needs to be saved for later books, the rest of the book should come faster, and go smoother. My, that is an encouraging thought, isn’t it?
I’ll stop blogging now and get to work before my brief spate of optomism fades. Late in a book, I’m always pesimistic. Don’t worry, just part of the process for me. I’ll cheer up about fifty to a hundred pages from the end, when everything is flying, and I get that writer’s high, sort of like runner’s high, but you don’t have to get all sweaty to experience it. Bye, for now.