A Pause To Reflect On Nature

I've finished the (admittedly draft) rewrite of the last chapter of Quite Contrary.  I've been assigned a new, official editor, and I'm waiting for her to contact me.  The one thing I'm absolutely sure she'll want to keep from the temporary editor's requests is a rewrite of the last chapter, so that's no waste of time.  It just plain needed fixing.  I'm considering revving up my inspiration to resume Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm A Supervillain, but I expect to be hip deep in editing before the week is up.  So until then, I have a break.  I don't give them to myself, so it's a pleasant feeling.

So this leaves me walking around in the neighborhood, enjoying the sunshine and fresh air and green growing things, when the robin equivalent of Kill Bill breaks out in front of me.  There's multiples of these little buggers swooping and tweeting and going after each other.  I wish I could have gotten a picture, but it lasted for about three seconds.  Three seconds of hardcore avian violence that will scar my innocent mind forever.  It was awesome.

In other avian news, I think ducks read my blog, and they're not happy about my descriptions of their demeanor.  The fellow pictured below now lives on my front lawn.  I look out the window, and there's this duck, watching me.  Front lawns are not normal nesting sites for mallards that I'm aware, but he's sticking around.

Let Us Celebrate!

Now that the contracts are signed and they're stuck with me, I would like to thank the good folks at Curiosity Quills for choosing to publish Sweet Dreams Are Made Of Teeth and Quite Contrary!  I was totally stunned that they want Quite Contrary.  Yes, it's more publishable than Princess Knives And Her Many Fantastic Adventures In Hell, but it's still some harsh little girl stuff.  Apparently they like that sort of thing!

Boy, did they sign the right person.

The fuss and the mass of editing involved is slowing down The Inscrutable Machine (which I am definitely going to call Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm A Supervillain from now on) considerably.  Right now I'm throwing around inspirations because an entire chapter of Quite Contrary has to be rewritten.  In the long term, it means I'll have more to say, more reason to say it, and incentive to write like a fiend!

For those of you following along at home, 'a fiend' is definitely what I write like.

Let The Evil Laughter Begin!

I wanted to make this its own chapter. It is a moment I've long awaited - the debut battle for the premier middle school supervillain team, The Inscrutable Machine!

Chapter Six

Less Scrutable By The Minute

And now, the dominos begin to fall. I hope the next chapter will be available soon, because it is the end of one part of the book and the beginning of the next. This is, after all, the story of a 13 year old middle school girl supervillain.

Chapter Five!

Anecdotes (Duck Edition)

So, we're going to skip over my unpleasant weekend to talk about the thing that happened just before it all descended into pain and fury. It was a bright and pretty Saturday morning, although quite gusty. I had a big bag of homemade bread that for miscellaneous reasons nobody was going to eat. I thought I'd go feed the ducks.

There's a duck pond nearby, a big cement thing behind an apartment complex. The walk is nice exercise if I go the long way, and I can bring my iSpud and pump myself full of music to inspire me for a day of writing. When I got there I couldn't see any ducks, only the two huge swans who swam right up to the edge of the pond and glared at me because I held food, might hold food, or might be made into food if I didn't pony up some bread. I tossed them a couple of crusts, and while they were busy I found that the duck flock was hidden around the corner of the building. They don't like getting near the swans, but the swans had food and would stay out of the way for awhile. The ducks saw a sucker and beelined for me. It looked like a great day of duck feeding.

Then duck nature took over. Ducks are, basically, feathered bags of spite. I threw out the first piece of bread, and every duck in the pond turned and attacked its neighbor. One single hen or duckess or whatever you call it had her eye on the prize, but in doing so she earned the ire of two mallards, who chased her relentlessly around the pond until I left. It might have been a mating thing, because 'consent' is a concept mallards leave to lesser avians, but none of the other mallards cared. These two just had an obsession. She'd fly to the other side of the pond, and they'd swim right through the flock, setting off more fights among anyone who'd settled down to feed, to attack her again.

Then the wind picked up, and thrashing waves - in a duck pond - swept the entire flock to the far side of the pond. The waves tipped the swans far enough over for me to learn that swans have huge, hideously mottled legs. I decided to go home, my faith in Nature restored.

Another Interruption Over

This will be short, because I need to fall on my face.

It's time to clean up Quite Contrary and start thinking about publishing. I got through the first editing pass on about a quarter of it, then went into writing starvation. So I wrote the next chapter of The Inscrutable Machine in a fit of madness.

Enjoy.

I will fall on my face now.

Back To The Machine!

Sometimes a writer stops and goes 'Where did those five thousand words come from?' I was worried that interrupting The Inscrutable Machine to write a short story would kill my mojo. Apparently not.

Here's Chapter Three!

And now I leave you to it. I'm getting that post-writing collapse, and I have a terrible headache and blah blah blah. Chapter 4 is already plotted out. I could theoretically begin writing it tomorrow.