Writer on Fire

Churl.

I read through the second Matador trilogy, made a few notes, and cleared the decks.

For ready reference, I have an e-book pirate to thank. A couple years ago, somebody sent me a link to a pirate site that had a bunch of SF novels up as torrents. This included most of the Matador novels, scanned into PDFs, so I downloaded them. Shortly thereafter, a writer with some clout -- not me -- got his publisher to shut the site down. The PDFs aren't perfect, but they are easily searchable.

You need to remember that I started writing these books more than twenty-five years ago, and the most recent ones dealing with the original crew at all go back eighteen years, to 1992. Time fogs the memory, so if I need to recall what color Geneva's eyes are -- icy gray -- I can go find it much faster on the computer than I can looking for where I put that in the original novel.

So, I sat down and started into it, and after two days, have drafted a couple chapters and a couple scenes to be plugged in later. Moving right along.

I'm thinking this one will write faster than Siblings was going. Might not, can't ever tell until you get there, but there are clues: When you sit down at nine a.m. and start writing, then look up at two p.m. and realize you have drunk the whole pot of coffee and haven't had lunch because you haven't left the chair except to pee for five hours, that's a good sign.

Whereas Siblings has been going along in fits and starts and some days I didn't seem to have an idea of what needed to come next, Churl seems to be laid out in my thoughts in pretty good detail. Yes, it's the kids and grandkids who will mostly be featured, but the old crew is still alive and will play some part.

Odd bits pop up and surprise me as I'm writing: Dirisha and Geneva have a son, whom they took turns carrying through the pregnancy. Sleel still makes swords, and he and Kee get a quarter-million stads each for them. Bork's son is as big and strong as Bork was, and he's half Albino Exotic, so he's got the looks and the hormones to go with that ...

Chapter Eleven Writer Bankruptcy is still in the future; and nothing since TMWNM has lit up white hot and roaring as much as that one did; still, this one is calling more than Sibs, and the squeaky wheel gets the oil, so ...

What I need is for somebody to start a Facebook group for fans of the Matadors, get about ten thousand members, and then I'll have something to wave at the editor and publisher when I get this one ready to market ...