Friday, February 22, 2008

The Dreadnaught Steams Away


After three butt-numbing days in my office chair, including yesterday, that had a stretch from nine a.m. until two p.m. during which I never got up even to pee, the first draft on the fantasy novel is done. It should have taken me five or six days, but once you see the barn, the tendency to run is sometimes overwhelming.

My performance at silat class this week was crappy, and while I can't blame it all on the book, some I can -- I was awash in alien seas and my hands were cramped, and after five hours in the chair and another hour and a half on the road, I was lucky I could stand up, much less move.

I have sent the ms off to my collaborator, and to those of you who indicated an interest, it will be going out as an email attachment on the morrow. I'll ship it to the addresses you sent, and if your box chokes at anything over a meg and three-tenths, you won't get it. If it doesn't show up in the next day or so, and you asked to see it, drop me a line.

Traditionally, this is where the writer offers the usual pool-hustler's excuses -- the light was bad, my arm was tired, the table was warped, i.e., explanations as to things about which I might have qualms and reasons why I wasn't up to my best game.

Not offering those. It is first-draft, which is excuse enough, and it stands on its own or not without me explaining it.

For those of you who have an interest in such things, the map Reaves and I came up with, showing oceans, countries, major cities, lakes, all like that, is posted at the top of this entry. You can click on it, enlarge it, and download it if you want to refer to it, or check back here. (Some fantasy readers love these things, some don't, but probably we'll include a cleaned-up version for the novel when it comes out. We have other sketches we used to keep things clear in our minds, a city map, a drawing of the dreadnaught, like that, but you shouldn't need those, nor, really, the map.)

And now I'm going to go sit in the hot tub ...

7 comments:

  1. The ms is in the mail ...

    Some of you got individual emails, until I figured out how to send 'em in a bunch, but, in theory, everybody who expressed an interest ought to have a copy of the file heading their way, as of 8:50 a.m today. Depending on the photonic winds and the aether and all, I can't imagine it should take long, unless you are on dial-up, in which case, it will ...

    And my thanks in advance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Couple of folks have had problems opening my file. I've sent the some other formats to try and correct this.

    Sometimes Mac programs get swoggled in transmission.

    If you have similar problems, lemme know, I have other WP programs, and can save to other kinds of docs. Bound to have something that will work.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I noticed my copy this evening, haven't tried to open it yet. I'm on a borrowed computer out of town this weekend (in Portland actually). I thought I'd let you know that the Gmail spam filters grabbed it and marked it as junk, so if anyone with a Gmail address says they didn't get it that may be the reason.

    Thanks!

    --Michael

    ReplyDelete
  4. Those of you using gmail seem to not like any of the file formats I'm trying. Last one I shipped was a PDF, and if that gets through and yours hasn't, lemme know and I'll try to send you that one.

    Just another pothole here on the information highway.

    ReplyDelete
  5. *sigh* yeah, gmail didn't flag it as spam, probably because I've gotten email from you before. What it did do was munge the header somehow so that none of my word-processors would read the format info properly. I had no trouble when you sent it to my other address.

    I didn't find the map necessary, but I think some people will want to have it. Anyway a big map always makes a nice endpaper.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Apparently Gmail allowed a PDF to pass, so if you are having troubles and want to try that format, lemme hear from you.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Already gotten comments from a couple of readers, and public thanks here to them, though I have already emailed them to say that.

    Want to know something that slaps a writer upside the head? You spend months, sometimes years, working on a book. Long sessions in the chair, keyboarding away, at the end of which time, you have a novel, some short, three hundred pages, some longer, and some that run almost 700 pp in ms form. And a reader picks it up and a day or two later, has finished it.

    Still makes me shake my head in wonder.

    This is why the writers I like can't ever catch up. They write a book a year, more or less, and I finish reading it one Saturday. If they have twenty novels out about a character, I can read them all before they can get another one done.

    It's a strange feeling to be on the other end of that -- Hey, why don't you write faster ... ?

    ReplyDelete