1.1.03

2003: Year of the Rewrites!

I kicked off with a bang! Current total: 3,042 rewritten, which completed the rewrite of Chapter 37 on Chazho. Tricky, because I had to add as well as cut. I turned "telling" paragraphs into selected scenes with dialogue, then crunched the dialogue so hard it tightened. This went great. I'm getting better at it the farther I go... and Chazho will be a marketable length when I'm done!

Progress will be posted daily on my third weblog: Prolific's Progress. Currently, the best way to get to it is to go to my gorgeous author page, designed by Mistress Nonny: http://www.pele.cx/~robertsloan2/ -- I love the page, I've put up some new things on it and it crosslinks to my LiveJournal and this blog. Bookmark that and you can check all three of them easily. :D

We'll be adding more cool stuff as time goes on too. When I get a little healthier, past the point where I'm in bed and to the point where I'm fiddling with artwork again, I'll do a series of illustrations for the Piarra Series - - all my great native animals, in a cool pen and ink style. That's how the series began, with dragon drawings. I didn't remember how to do the face of a Chinese dragon. I made one up. I didn't remember that real Chinese dragons' legs were so screwy they might have one hip way up ahead of the other - Chinese dragons are stylized. My critters weren't, because I grew up on paleontology and the backstory demanded that I work out plausible animals that could have evolved on a natural planet.

And other fun quasifannish stuff. I will get around to doing the 17 letters of the alphabet sometime, it's usually a runic alphabet. I've described the ideogram calligraphy too and even done the one for Court based on Holly Lisle's "Great Plot" diagram (with permission)... but I would not want to work out all the thousands of its letters. Just teh ones I need when I need them. The one that works like an alphabet is good enough for, say, signing my name in Piarran and other Tolkein-fannish things. :D

So I love worldbuilding. Hee hee. This one cooked for over 25 years and I think it's about ready.

Robert and Ari >^..^< (My electric blanket. Mine. Happy New Year!)