A new, weird stage

Fiona has asked for, and received, permission to read Emerald House Rising.

I am mildly surprised to discover how nervous this makes me feel.

First I had to get used to the idea of my mother reading my fiction. And now my children.

Oy. She was in utero when I wrote the damn thing.

Peg

World Fantasy Convention

I am going to be at the World Fantasy Convention, which is being held, conveniently enough, in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 31-November 3. At this point, I will be on one panel (on something re: children's fantasy, I believe--wonder why they put me on that???[yuck, yuck, yuck]). I will be sharing a reading with kijjohnson. Of the hour and a half that we will have for the reading, kijjohnson will spend about a half hour reading from her newly completed novel (which, unless she changed it again, will be called Fudoki). We will spend most of the rest of the time reading from our collaborative novel, the partially-completed letter game book set at the beginning of the Civil War. This is a very exciting project that we've had to set aside for the time being, due to Kij's contract with Tor, but we both think it's viable and plan to get back to it some day. For those not familiar with the term, a letter game book is created when two authors write to one another in character. The only rule of the game is that they cannot tell each other what they think the plot is! For published examples, see Sorcery and Cecelia by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer, and Freedom and Necessity by Steven Brust and Emma Bull.

Since I'm just starting this new novel, I don't have much to read by myself. I have a completed short story, but have decided not to read that. I have decided, instead, to commit to completing the first scene of this novel by World Fantasy, and I will read that: the scene where Solveig breaks through the ice and her father saves her, but drowns himself. I've already started writing it. I am not quite sure how long it will be--sort of a prologue, probably a third to a half of the length of a standard chapter. Anyway, that's my promise to you all, and my first writing commitment on this book: by World Fantasy, this first scene will be complete and I will read it. Come to the reading to hear it! That much at least it a rock-solid commitment, but I hope to have even more by then.

Cheers,
Peg

Absolute favorite web site for research

Here's my hands-down favorite web site for me as a writer (well, besides Google, and we all know about that, don't we?) It's refdesk.com. Bookmark it and marvel. In the five years I've kept coming back to this site, I keep finding more and more stuff that's amazingly useful. Spend some time exploring all the nested pages on this site and you'll find an astonishing cornucopia of research treasures.

Here's one I found just this week. Sure wish I'd known about it when I was researching The Wild Swans. It's on the refdesk.com Daily Almanac Page, and it's the link called Time Capsule. Simply enter a date, and you'll find out what songs were popular on that date, what were the newspaper headlines, the popular TV shows, the toys in the stores, typical prices, the average income . . . everything you need to give verisimilitude to historical writing.

Also check out the Quick Reference/Research page, the Fast Facts page, the Top 10 page, the Journalists' Tools page, and on and on. You can find an expert, find a perpetual calendar, find the NASA web site, find absolutely anything you could possibly need.

Spread the word. For writers, this site is simply the best.

(And yes, it's where I got my "words, words words" icon!)

Peg

First progress report

I'll do this periodically:

Word total: 500
Words written today: 100

(Only, say, about 99,500 to go).

Cheers,
Peg