Naked

Oh, dear. Who knew that following another's blog would mean this silly blog would become visible? I admit, I'm woefully behind the times (and woefully behind on my blog). I have never "followed" anyone before, because I wasn't quite sure what it meant. No time like the present. (And no present like time.)

So I suppose I ought to briefly update my blog, as the last post was over a year ago. And now that I'm exposed, I suppose I'll have to keep updating my blog. This whole public persona thing gives me the wiggins, I have to say. (Stop staring at me! Oh, wait...that was only the painters standing on the scaffolding directly outside my bedroom window while I sit here in my bathrobe at 4:00 in the afternoon. Another story for another dreadful blog post.)

To sum up over a year of blog silence, I finished up The Blood Maiden's Vision (formerly Under Galga) rewrite last Thanksgiving and sent it off to an LGBT small press looking for romantic fantasy. In February, they responded to say that it wasn't LGBT enough. (Because the B in LGBT apparently stands for "by the way, we mean same-sex only.") But they did give me some very useful critique.

Meanwhile, I had vowed to complete my Queen of Heaven book once and for all (after all, I'd gone all the way to Russia and started learning a foreign language just to write it), and I had begun in December, giving myself a deadline of April 1. It wasn't long before I realized that, dammit, I was writing not a single novel, but a trilogy. I then gave myself three deadlines: April 1, June 1, and September 1, to write the whole thing. I've pretty much been sitting here in my bathrobe ever since.

I finished The House of Arkhangel'sk in early February, and a second draft by the beginning of March. Not wanting to lose momentum, I launched straight into The Fallen Queen, and finished up its second draft by the end of May. Each day became progressively more difficult to force myself to sit and write (I'm not one of those people who can crank out thousands of words in a day), but the story wanted out, and I wanted it out. Writing the final book, The Midnight Court, was a painful, upward climb (barefoot, through snow), but just two weeks past my deadline, The Queen of Heaven trilogy was finally done.

I had hoped I could remain a bit detached from this story, because the last one took so much out of me, and each rejection was like having the same raw wound torn open again and again. (To those who like to scoff at us sorry losers who feel pain over a rejection, you know, some of us just feel it, all right? It hurts like hell and I keep going. I'm bipolar: a rejection is a suicidal low, but the writing is an ecstatic, religious high.) But I fell in love again. I couldn't help it. The damn things just get under your skin.

This weekend I'll be in the sleet of Cincinnati paying a Writer's Digest editor $300 (not to mention airfare and lodging) to beat the hell out of my little darling. As much as I've always loathed this saying, I hope what doesn't kill my little darling will make it stronger. As for me? Hell, I'm a masochist. I don't know when to quit.