Random Thursday Thoughts
Our local pizza place has a sticker which reads, “Property protected by 24 hour vidoe surveillance.” Not a hand-scrawled note, but a professionally printed sticker. This sort of thing is kryptonite to me. I had to fight the urge to rip the sticker off the window and encase it in lead.
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Elizabeth Moon has a LiveJournal. Yesterday, she shared her thoughts about military discipline and the removal of General McChrystal. In addition to being an excellent author, Moon is also a former junior officer in the Marine Corps. She knows of what she speaks, and posts like this are the reason I follow her blog.
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From a Twitter post by my agent: “Joshua in NYC B&N admiring ‘They Stand Against Darkness’ floor riser w/ @jimchines Red Hood’s Revenge.” I want to run out to B&N right now to see this floor display!!! (And then I want to take it home with me and set it up on the ego shelf!)
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I changed my process when I started working on the third draft of Snow Queen. This is not an easy thing for me. I tend to find a routine and stick to it, no matter what happens. (Just ask my wife.) So it was scary to throw out my old approach and try something new with draft three … but it seems to be working so far. If this holds, it could save me as much as a month’s worth of work. Go me!
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Am I the only one who’s been losing interest with Sluggy Freelance these past few months?
zollmaniac
June 24, 2010 @ 9:46 am
What did you change about your process?
And I lost interest in Sluggy years ago. ><
Jim C. Hines
June 24, 2010 @ 9:54 am
Short version: I usually do a total rewrite, starting from a blank page one. It allows me to fix and add a lot. But this time, I think draft two was pretty much ready in a lot of places, so instead of starting with the blank page, I’m reading and working through the finished manuscript, editing as I go.
Longer version may come later, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of the approach.
Steven Saus
June 24, 2010 @ 10:34 am
Dittos with the Sluggy Freelance. Goats has gone the same way. I started reading both for the zany, but they went story-arc on me… and quite simply, that’s not what I was reading them for.
Jim C. Hines
June 24, 2010 @ 10:35 am
Goats? I’m not familiar with that one.
Sluggy had some very powerful story arcs, but lately … I’m just reading out of habit, and I think it may be time to break that habit.
MichaelM
June 24, 2010 @ 11:28 am
I’ve not read Sluggy, but I’m going off Questionable Content. It’s the only webcomic I read now, and chances are it’ll be the last one.
We have a lot of apostrophe misuse in the UK, it’s quite staggering. My mum runs a home business (and possibly another one soon) and I’m going to make sure the displays are grammatically correct before they’re printed! Nothing worse than utterly ridiculous grammar, eh? 😉