First things first — congrats to all the Nebula nominees this year! I can’t believe how many people I know on the list — up-and-comers as opposed to old guard. It’s awe inspiring! (Just wait, in a year or two, they’ll all be old guard too, ha!)
Special shout outs to my writing buddies Rachel Swirsky and Barry Deutsch — especially Barry, since this is his first time. Barry’s up for a Norton award for his YA graphic novel, Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword. I seriously cannot wait for my niece to be old enough to read this with her. It’s so charming and fantastic and empowering. I adore it.
Secondly, I started editing again! I started editing last night, and was mmmmphy about it…but today I felt I hit my stride. Word counts don’t really matter so much anymore, so now we’ll be going on pages done count. I’m at 13 out of 137 (all single spaced, non-courier, etc). I’m trying to edit it as ruthlessly as I had to edit Nightshifted, when my agent told me to take out 6K. That…was like punching myself in the face with a rock. But it made me appreciate economy, and I’m re-using those lessons here. It’s frightening to greet a paragraph of exposition and say, “Eh — I will context you in later” and toss it. But each time I do the right thing now and take stuff out, that only leaves more room for the future awesome. Right? Right.
(There’ll still need to be one more pass after this, very brief, for a few timeline things, but the last time i did that pass it only took 2-3 days? So we’re not counting that at the mo’.)
In other news, I am physically feeble, but healthy again. Our PT’s at work tell our patients that they lose a week’s worth of strength for every day they were in bed, and I always thought that was exaggerating, but now i begin to see their point. I was just starting on my Back Health Quest via yoga and gym-stuff, and then I was waylaid, so it wasn’t like i had much strength to give up. I’ll be getting my ass (and back, and the rest of me) to yoga tomorrow, and the journey (to Mordor) of a thousand steps will begin again ;).