Updates and Football

Hey folks.

I know I've been pretty scarce of late. First, The Once and Future Poet took a LOT more time and effort and energy than I was expecting. I'd planned on having the Sept, Oct, and Nov Rookery Creek releases all set and ready to go by the end of August. Yeah, I barely finished Poet, much less the other two.

And still not entirely sure what I'm doing for Halloween...

Also, my depression has been kicking up again. Trying to nip that in the bud, but it's made it easier to ignore writing in favor of, oh, sleep. And watching football.

Speaking of football, if you haven't already experienced Scott Sigler's Galactic Football League series, you should give it a try. It's been described as "Star Wars meets The Godfather meets Any Given Sunday," and that's pretty accurate. You can listen to the first three books ABSOLUTELY FREE over at Podiobooks.com, or on iTunes. I only started really liking football after listening to these books.

So, back to me. I've finally started on Empire's Shadow, which is the novel I brought to The Roundtable Podcast a couple months ago. (Don't listen if you don't like spoilers.) I've been trying and trying and trying to figure out how to start this puppy, and finally I decided to just stop trying to get it right the first time and dive on in. So I've got the first scene mostly written (crappy first draft written, granted), but as I figured, once I started it just got moving. So I have hopes of not getting too stuck as I work my way toward the middle. The problem with having a well-filled-out timeline spanning twenty-five years or so, when your story only really spans ten years or so, is figuring out where the story's frame starts and ends.

I can already tell I'm going to have to totally rewrite everything I'm writing now, which is really frustrating because this only happens to me on the long fiction, not the short fiction so much. (Succor the Child was a notable exception, but then, I lost temporary sanity on that one.) Right now it's very distant and telly, but once I get a handle on young Isolde this should get pretty darn fun.

And I feel like less of a slacker now that I'm working on a long project again.