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Posts tagged as “Dakota Frost”

Liquid Fire @ 7479 words

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~20,000 words behind schedule, 42,000 words to go. Fortunately I'm taking off the entire week of Thanksgiving and hiding in an undisclosed location until I'm caught up. A further taste, of raw unedited text:

“Sooo…” she said, still staring across the aisle. “What brings you to San Francisco?”

“Oh, hell,” I said, leaning back in the chair. I felt the baby in the seat behind me reach at my Mohawk, grabbing a thread of purple before her mother pulled her back. “I’ve got quite the agenda, but mostly … negotiating with people to establish some new rules for magic.”

“Rules for magic?” Granola Girl asked, brow furrowing. “Really?”

“Well, that, some other, uh, business, plus taking my daughter to colleges—”

“Go back to the rules for magic bit,” Granola Girl said—and no, really, I’m not making fun of her; she ordered yogurt-and-granola on the flight out. “Magic isn’t just ‘more than the sum of its parts;’ it transcends the parts that invoke it. You can’t reduce magic to something less than what it is. If you start putting rules on magic—a tabu on mana—you’ll cripple it.”

I let out my breath. I’d heard all this before. Heck, I had to break all the rules I knew just to start practicing magic. But to keep practicing magic, you had to be really careful, or it would kill you. And recently, I’d found that it could kill other people too.


Reading it I can already see things I want to fix. Not now. Must press onward.

-the Centaur

It is amazing how mentally freeing it is…

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... to have just one more thing off your todo list. Really, I have just about as much to do now as I did before I finished the edits of _Frost Moon_. It's just that I feel much better about what I have left.

Completion. A wonderful feeling.
-the Centaur

Of course, be real…

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...the idea you can make something happen if you "prioritize" it works only if you have enough time with which to make the time. Editing two novels and writing a third - all on deadlines, some of them tight - while working late many nights AND taking care of a new and extremely needy cat can lead to you crashing out repeatedly before blogging, and sometimes it's only after you've crashed early several nights but have been sniffling and coughing enough that only way you can sleep is on Nyquil that you realize, maybe, just maybe, you're fighting off a bug.

Meanwhile, Warren Ellis is fighting as many deadlines as I am while also writing a seven-volume epic mashup called War and Peace of the Worlds featuring the entire cast of Archie Comics turned gritty postmodern superheroes, is doing it all one handed on his Palm Pilot while using the other to lean on his cane as he climbs Mount Everest after having coughed up a lung ... and is still blogging three times a day.

@!$%##?!
-the Centaur

Five Days Behind

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Between the new cat, work, finishing up Blood Rock, and business with Frost Moon, I've gotten far behind on Nanowrimo this month. But now I'm back on track, have finished a more detailed outline which solves some of my plot problems and gives me some fun crunchy stuff to work with ... and have finally caught up to my first day's target word count, ~1700 words (you need to do at least 1666 words a day to complete Nano). Hopefully things will speed up from this point ... need to do ~1933 words a day to finish successfully.

National Novel Writing Month 2009 Entry: Liquid Fire

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Well, it is that time of year again: November, and National Novel Writing Month. This year I'm working on Book 3 of the Dakota Frost series, Liquid Fire, which features Dakota, firespinning, and dragons:
What is life? No scientist can tell you. Oh, the pocket-protector variety will say that living things move, eat and grow, wrapped up in ten-dollar words like ‘locomotion’ and ‘intake’ and ‘self-organization’. But these by themselves are not life: a waterfall moves more vibrantly than any animal, a fire eats more efficiently, a crystal is more organized.

A worldly scientist, aware of the dance of the sexes, will mention the heat of metabolism, the fire of reproduction. But a fire eats to live just like we do, but faster: and where we breed in a slow dance of desire, a fire lives in a hot orgy of giving, casting off its own substance, flying sparks, glowing seeds, drifting through the air to start the cycle again. If metabolizing and reproducing were all there were to life, would not fire be alive?

But life is not any one of these things: life is all of them together. It is the combination of moving and eating and organizing, of metabolism and reproduction, of a thousand things more. Put them all together, and you get more than you started with: a holistic — holy — combination that is more than the sum of its parts. Life is magic.

Or more precisely, magic is life.
As usual, I have a theme, plot, and know almost exactly how it will end. But more than the previous two books in the series, I feel like I'm stepping off into a great void, even though the magic of this book - firespinning - is an art I myself perform, unlike the tattoos featured in Frost Moon (of which I have none) and the graffiti featured in Blood Rock (of which I have done none). All I have to go on this one are love, fire ... and the nightmares from the Hadean.

Wish me luck.
-the Centaur

Frost Moon Back In the Hands of the Editor

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frost moon

Frost Moon, the first novel I wrote that ever got serious interest from a publisher, is now back in the hands of the editor. Things are looking good, we're on the same page for the first twelve chapters ... though, sadly, their 2009 schedule has filled and there's no way the book is going to come out before the beginning of 2010.

Now it's the race to finish the edits of Blood Rock by the end of October, so I can send it to my beta readers and start work on "Liquid Fire" for National Novel Writing Month...

Wish me luck!
-the Centaur

Back to Blood Rock

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The Internet.  A huge distraction.   You're writing happily away when suddenly you wonder whether your steampunk heroine ran into Einstein during her trip to Germany and, if so, was he young enough to date her.  Thirty seconds later Wikipedia tells you yes ... but thirty minutes later you mysteriously find yourself still researching the priority of relativity controversy.

So: the Internet goes off when I'm writing now, and I collect questions in a text file while I work for later research.  So far, this plan is working well.

Sent from my gPhone.

Blogging from the Convention Floor

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marriot marquis at night

Ah, Dragon*Con: that magic time in September when 50,000 of my closest friends get together to transform four hotels in Atlanta into a gateway to another world.

most aliens are less cute than alf

Dragon*Con has some of the best costumes you'll see this side of an Anime convention - much better than what you'll find at the much larger San Diego Comicon. Practically everyone is dressed up and some of them are amazing.

the panels

Another real draw is the fantastic variety of panels. There are literally dozens of tracks at Dragon*Con and programming goes on until 11:30 pm or later - and there are often social events until 2 and 3 in the morning.

the costumes

After the panels it's fun to just peoplewatch; you can do it for hours.

a picture of me? but why?

Women dressed up get quite a bit of attention - though sometimes, as in this case, they seem more surprised to have people taking their picture than you'd expect for all the effort they've put into their costumes.

cylons are less impressive without helmets

Another piece of the fun is the sheer variety of fans. You see of course people pulling off Cylons ... somewhat less impressive with the helmets off...

omg it's dakota frost

You see costumes that mean something only to the viewer, as in this Dakota Frost lookalike...

force push

The ubiquitous Jedi, in this case posing for a photo taken by a Sith ...

a heartwrenching tale

... and then finally sheer randomness by simply creative people.

even sith love slave leia

Fans love taking pictures of fans - it was quite interesting sitting with a Sith shutterbug, watching him take pictures of passing Poison Ivys and Slave Leias.

jedis gone wild

But then some people wanted to take pictures of him ... and then, bizarrely, two women wanted to have their pictures taken fellating his lightsabers. Utterly weird, and a great source of amusement to us and the other people at our table.

derrick and doublebladed sabers

But ultimately that's the fun of Dragon*Con: not just seeing Jedi taking pictures of Sith, but running into old friends dressed as Jedi taking pictures of old friends dressed as Sith. Because in the end its the friendships that make Dragon*Con more than just a fan playground or a party: it's a family.

centaur blogging from the convention floor

From the Dragon*Con Convention floor(1), this is your Centaur reporting. Good night, and good luck.

-the Centaur

(1) Technically, sent from my hotel room because connectivity on the con floor was too poor.