May Posts
- First Drafts and Copy Edits: April in Review
- On Finding time to Write: An Indie Author’s Perspective
- Learning to Love Romance
- My Top Ten Podcasts
Speculative Chic Posts
- Sound Off! Avengers: Endgame
- Sound Off! Pokémon Detective Pikachu
- Lovable Characters, Monstrous Page Count: A Review of European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman
Another month in the can. Well, almost. I mistimed my posts (oops!), so I decided to bump this one up a week, But May is pretty much over, and I’m going to be on vacation all week, so it seemed like a good time to reflect regardless.
On the writing front, May was split between three projects. At the beginning of the month, I did my first rounds of revisions for Riley’s Story: A Red and Black One-Shot, which is the novelette I hope to release to my newsletter subscribers around the new year (please subscribe if you’d like to receive it). And it went surprisingly well. While I’ve written short fiction in the past, since I usually focus on longer projects, I tend to try to cram too much story into too short a word count. But this one seemed to work out. Which has me suspicious that I’m just not picking up on all of it’s flaws. It still has a way to go before I’m ready to release it to the world, so we’ll see!
After I finished working on Riley’s Story, I found myself in a bit of a window. Black and Blue, the sequel to Red and Black, was in the hands of my proofreader (more on that later). Red and Black 3 was (and still is) in the hands of my beta readers. Not wanting to waste time, I turned to last year’s NaNoWriMo novel. Red and Black 4 and worked on some initial revisions. This one’s gonna need quite a bit of work, but it feels very doable. Or at least the first third of it did. If I recall, all the scary shit’s at the end.
The third project for May has been proofreading Black and Blue. I ended up facing a bit of a snag for this, as I had to find a new proofreader kind of last minute. Fortunately, my new editor is a complete professional and has really gone above and beyond. As a result, it’s taking a little longer than expected to complete the final touches on Black and Blue, but we still should be on schedule for publishing around the end of July, which is also when my-and Alex’s!- birthday lies.
Outside of writing, it’s been a solid month, but busy, which is why I’m really glad that I decided to take a vacation this week. Tanner and I don’t travel. It’s expensive, and as introverts, we’re not big on leaving the house. Still, I’m looking forward to taking time for catching up on my sleep. reading great books (which I will post about, of course!), visiting with family, and maybe even seeing Avengers: Endgame again.
Speaking of the geek space, I, like pretty much everyone, was disappointed with the ending for Game of Thrones. I’m fine where some of the characters ended up. In fact, I think I took certain twists better than others. But at the end end of the day, I feel like the show really botched the arcs for so many of the big characters (Cersi, Tyrion, Jon, Jamie and, of course, Daenerys), which is going to taint my opinion of the show quite a bit. Tom, over on the Sword and Laser podcast, pointed out that a lot of the problems stemmed from the writers having a huge amount of material to pull from, to basically no material to pull from. I couldn’t agree more. As easy it is for us to sit here and craft fan theories after the fact, writing is hard. And writing an ending that will satisfying tens of millions of people is really fucking hard.
I’m not happy with how the writers treated characters that I have spent so many years getting emotionally invested in, but I also feel kind of bad for them. They had an ENORMOUS challenge in front of them when it came to ending Game of Thrones (whether it was this year, or in the future). The fact that they dropped the ball probably shouldn’t be as surprising as it is.
Hopefully, we’ll be moving into a more positive arena with nerdy properties in the summer. I know I am pumped for Spider-man: Far from Home, not to mention the return of My Hero Academia in the fall. Just because Game of Thrones was a fail, doesn’t mean the future can’t be full of wins.
Nancy O'Toole 