pameladean

I am certainly doing this entry to avoid working on my book, but it's been long enough since I did an update that I feel entitled.

Ever since I hurt my shoulder whenever that was, typing for more than ten minutes has caused a pins-and-needles sensation in my left hand. It grows less with time, but I don't think this is anything to be messing around with. So I've been writing the book in longhand, which doesn't cause any pecular symptoms except for an inability to revise meaningfully above the level of tweaking the vocabulary around a bit. This difficulty will not be anything more than an annoyance for several more chapters, by which time I hope to be able to type the stuff in.

Please don't recommend transcription software, or whatever it's called. It would break my brain. Obviously if I must, I must, but that point is a long way away.

I managed to reread The Dubious Hills -- for those of you who have arrived late, the work in progress is a sequel to that book and also to The Whim of the Dragon -- for the third time since I put together the book proposal. This is the first time that I've actually managed to read it as a story rather than skimming along the top and noticing everything I'd have done differently and the occasional forgotten beauty, and thinking ARGH about the former and, DID I REALLY WRITE THAT about the latter. I have no idea what the voice of the book will be like when the characters are all (heaven help me) in one location (I'm insane to contemplate this), but I'm interested to see that while recapturing the voice of the Secret Country books was very easy, recapturing that of Hills was almost impossible. I thought it would be hard, but not in the ways that it actually was hard.

The scene in question is a chapter or two away, but I know how Ruth will react to first seeing Arry, and this is comforting.

My rejected work in progress has ceased to sulk in the corner and is leaping up and down and flinging short-story ideas around like mylar ribbons. They can just wait. Short stories are infinitely more trouble than novels, infinitely more sanity-threatening, infinitely more likely to make me want to go hide in a cave. Pesky things.

P.