We do seem to have an internet connection, but it is a bit on the iffy side so I can not be assured of being able to do daily updates.

Today was a pretty good day. Oh the first Panel I went to was a bust. Turned out it was about painting and drawing not writing. I can not paint or draw and new media vs old media in that fight has no meaning to me.
Next I went to “Is Manned Space Travel Gone Forever?” It was a pretty well attended panel, with lively panelists. A panel on the SF movies of 2009 veered wildly off topic — I know, shocking — but still proved to be entertaining. One of the panelists reported that he had interviewed John Frankenhammer director of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and that the director totally viewed that classic film as a work of SF.

The best panel of the day was two panelists, Tim Powers and Harry Turtledove, on if history was a help or a hindrance to plotting. These two men riffed together and the room was packed and everyone was entertained.

I saw my first plastered panel at the end of the day. Okay, they weren’t plastered but they both brought scotch to the panel and drank as they discussed horror and taboos.

The day is done, one last panel to attend and then parties.

In less than an hour we depart for Westercon in Pasadena. I have all my essentials packed: clothes, toiletries, and manuscripts for editing.

I’ll be driving half the distance and my wife will be driving the other half, If We don;t have access to the internet see you next week.

Well, I have pretty much recovered from my oral surgery and the fun that it was. I went back to work today, ate pretty much normally, and in general returned to my life.

I have started on Cawdor version 1.5. There will be a few changes and alteration to the manuscript and then I’ll be handing it over to my sweetie wife for copy-editing before it goes to my beat readers. (Gosh, I guess I gotta find some beta readers.)

This ends a perfect month of posting everyday. Go team me!

I may not start of July so strongly. Tomorrow I drive to LA for Westercon and if there is no internet connection I will not be updating over the long holiday weekend.

First draft is done. Total word count is currently 83000 words, but I have some revision and establishment to do so I might add a couple of thousand more word. I expect that I’ll land around 85,000 to 87,000 words.

I feel pretty good despite the surgery of yesterday. A little worn out, a little flush, but finishing a story is always  high.

can’t sleep…..clowns will eat me

I am scheduled for oral surgery today, so this might be the extent of posting.

Hopefully see you all on Tuesday.

From what I can gather this is one of the more common and more frustrating questions p[published writers get from readers. No, I am mostly unpublished so few people ask or I suspect care about the answer to this question as far as it pertains to myself.

I can give a partial answer though. I get my ideas from the treadmill.

It seems that more often than not when I walk power-walking (with bad arthritic knees one does NOT jog) on the treadmill as part of my cardio exercise I have an epiphany . So I have to say that teh treadmill is one place where I get my ideas.

(Today it wad food-chits and prostitution, a real break-through for my novel._

My friend and author Gail Carriger is coming to town if a book signing and presentation.
This is special for me as Gail is the first person I’ve personally known who has gone fromt he ranks of unpublished novelist to published.
Of course being Gail she didn’t just stroll across that dividing line, she blew across it in style writing the very well received Soulless, and followed it up the New York Times Bestseller, Changeless. The third book in the series, Blameless comes out in September and to promote that book one of the place she will be stopping is San Diego’s very own, Mysterious Galaxy.

I am so looking forward to her visit in September.

…But what will happened when it gets here.

Statistician Nate Silver places the odds of a Republican taker-over of the House at about 50%, lower than I would have expected . I wish we had the aggregate polling data from 1994 because I would love to see an apples to apples comparison on the generic ballot.

One thing that we are not seeing that a lot of people told me we would see is that passing healthcare reform would send people packing to vote the Democrats out of power. That a vote for HCR was in effect a vote for the Democrats to cut their own throats.

While HCR is still more unpopular than it is popular, there has been no swing against it and in fact support for it has been rising.

Sop if November comes and the Democrats hold on to the House by a seat or two, what does that mean?

So Cawdor is very nearly finished in its first draft form. I am working on Chapter 25 and that is the final chapter of the book. It is unlikely that I will finish it tomorrow, but I’ll probably have the chapter more than half done by the end of the day.

It has proved to be an interesting trip. I learned quite a bit writing this novel.

I learned I don’t know what my books are about until I actually write them.

I learned that I do not accept that Macbeth is the villain of the play.

I learned that I liked doing a ‘rolling edit’ better than writing the entire novel and then having 300-400 pages to edit. It also gave my brain time to process story elements while I edited so I think I turned out a stronger plot and set of characters.

I learned I love my outlines, but I’m not afraid to walk of the path when the story goes somewhere else. The outline shows me the end point so I am free to explore along the way.

Today is also the official 1 year anniversary of me submitted Love & Loyalty to a major publisher. I know that this is how the biz works. If you do not have an agent you wait and wait and wait. Sort like the DMV but you can get on with your life while you wait.