{"id":81,"date":"2008-11-04T14:15:27","date_gmt":"2008-11-04T14:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/?p=81"},"modified":"2017-02-20T22:51:45","modified_gmt":"2017-02-20T22:51:45","slug":"waiting-for-the-other-shoe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/04\/waiting-for-the-other-shoe\/","title":{"rendered":"Waiting for the Other Shoe…"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, I don’t mean the election, despite the date — if I decide I need to say something about that I’ll probably put it in my LiveJournal<\/a>. This is about what I’m doing while I wait for word from my editor.<\/p>\n

I delivered A Young Man Without Magic<\/i> to Brian Thomsen, my editor at Tor, in September. Then I worked on the sequel for awhile; I was pretty confident that Brian would be pleased with it, since he’d recommended I write the series in the first place (as opposed to the more traditional fantasy, The Dragon’s Price<\/i>, which I’d come up with at roughly the same time). Brian was the guy who talked Tor into a two-book deal for the series. He’d read the proposal, which included a hundred pages of the novel. He knew what he was getting. So I was working on the sequel.<\/p>\n

Then on September 22, Brian dropped dead of a heart attack. Which sucked in many, many ways, as Brian was a very good guy, but one of the minor results was that it meant I got a new editor.<\/p>\n

And the new editor, while by all accounts a nice guy and a good editor, had not read the proposal. He had not read the books that were my inspiration. He had never discussed anything with me. I have no idea at all<\/i> what he’s going to think of the novel. My agent assumes it’ll all be fine, because after all I’m an established professional with a thirty-year track record, but my agent hasn’t read the novel yet and hasn’t really worked with the new editor much.<\/p>\n

I’m not so sure. A Young Man Without Magic<\/i> is not my usual stuff.<\/p>\n

So I found myself unable to concentrate on the sequel. What if he wants major revisions on the first book that would affect the plot of the second?<\/p>\n

So I’ve put aside Above His Proper Station<\/i> until such time as I hear back from Ye Editor. Which I had hoped would be by now, but so far, not a word.<\/p>\n

Instead I’m working on other stuff. Of which I have a surfeit; I have literally hundreds of unfinished stories lying around. I added a few pages to The Dragon’s Price<\/i>. I finished a chapter of Realms of Light<\/i>, the sequel to Nightside City<\/i><\/a> that I plan to write as an online serial in the not-too-distant future.<\/p>\n

Mostly, though, I decided I should finish Vika’s Avenger<\/i>, a science-fantasy story I’ve had lying around for a couple of years. It was the closest to being complete of anything handy. Wrapping it up will decrease the backlog a little. It’s a sort of detective story. Sort of. But it’s set in a half-deserted city on another planet, thousands of years in the future.<\/p>\n

So I’ve been working on that lately, and it’s been coming along, until a couple of nights ago when I ran into massive plot problems because my planned ending isn’t turning out the way I wanted it to. The characters have refused to cooperate, and they’re right to do so — my original plan really didn’t make as much sense as I thought.<\/p>\n

Drat.<\/p>\n

But once I get past this next scene, it’s all just wrap-up, and I’ll have a complete first draft, probably 75,000-80,000 words. Now, if I can just figure out how to make it happen…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, I don’t mean the election, despite the date — if I decide I need to say something about that I’ll probably put it in my LiveJournal. This is about what I’m doing while I wait for word from my editor. I delivered A Young Man Without Magic to Brian Thomsen, my editor at Tor,… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":799,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.watt-evans.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}