A Con over the Weekend

I went to SpoCon over the weekend and primarily went to all the panels that talked about writing fiction. There were also gamers, steampunk, anime fans, comics, movie buffs, and all sorts of other geeky stuff, but I didn’t have time to go see much of it.

An interesting thing I learned: A lot of authors do what they call “rolling edits.” In other words, they start editing previous chapters even as they write future chapters. The conventional wisdom concerning revisions is to finish your first draft, stick it in a drawer, forget about it for six months, and then come back and do revisions. Caveat: Rolling edits probably developed as a revision technique because writers under contract have deadlines and do not have the luxury of waiting six months.

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A little old lady was toting some sort of steampunk gadget around:

SpoCon 2011 Guest of Honor, Patricia Briggs (right), and a model for the covers of Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series (left):

The coolest looking car in the parking lot:

A Closing and an Opening

I finished Temperance and the Devil around 8 PM on the last day of July. Which was sort of surprising, really. I wasn’t quite sure where or when the story would end, just that it would. I had semi-expected it to end a bit later if the story arc ran a bit long. But then again, it might not. That’s one of the problems with writing without planning. You have no idea where you’re going next or when the end will be in sight.

But end, it has. I’m a bit relieved, mostly because by the middle I felt rather directionless. Half the time, I had the urge to just put it off and come back to it later. But with a month-long binge writing contest, that would just be giving up. So I am finished and I am glad. And in one respect, it turned out rather well. In the Major Arcana, there are twenty-one numbered cards and the Fool. In this story, there are twenty-one chapters and an epilogue. As the villain might say, “Perfect.”

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So, August has begun. Which means Augnowrimo and another round of Camp Nanowrimo. I think I have a few themes pinned down now. They have to be themes and not an actual plot, since I’ve decided on doing a series of interconnected short stories. I’m tentatively calling the entire project “Islands of Ice and Snow” which will mostly be about isolation, hoarding, or maybe even literally, islands of ice and snow.

I have a couple of ideas, but we’ll see how it goes.