Of This and Other Worlds

Leila over at Bookshelves of Doom is talking about embarrassing Hallowe'en costumes today -- lizbee, you really need to go and check out her post if you haven't seen it already.

For the first time in I can't even remember how long, today's Sluggy Freelance strip made me laugh out loud. Possibly this is because I have spent way too much time Geocaching with avarill, but...

Nah, I think it really is funny.

* * *

I finished revising Chapter 13 of Knife today! I'm nearly 2/3rds done! And I've knocked off 10,000 words from the ms. so far, none of which were doing any good whatsoever (people eat sandwiches, they take baths, they hang about waiting for other things to happen, they have long conversations about paintings the reader can't see and artists the reader probably doesn't know, etc.).

Meanwhile, I've streamlined the plot -- oh, there are still red herrings and unanswered questions and (I hope) plenty of other things to keep the reader guessing, but there aren't so many tangents. I've also eliminated a number of unnecessary characters (does the Queen really need three attendants, when there are only forty-seven faeries in the Oak? I think not) and given a minor antagonist (Mallow, for those of you who read the last draft) a more substantial and ongoing role.

Still, by far the biggest changes will be coming in this last section, where I finally say goodbye to an element that people have been questioning from the beginning and replace it with a much more action-oriented scene that I'm quite excited about. Until now the last few chapters of the book have been very talky, with all the big revelations coming out in a single conversation; in this draft I plan to spread that information out a bit, and give Knife a more dynamic role in bringing it to light.

I have great hopes that my editor will be pleased with this revision, and I think it will definitely help the book's saleability to foreign markets -- but we'll see. In any case I'm still on track to turn in the revised draft by the end of February, which makes it very likely indeed that Knife will hit the shelves in the summer of 2009, rather than 2010 as originally scheduled. Yay!

I'm really not a Michael Buble fan, but I have to say that his cover version of a certain classic television theme is, indisputably, MADE OF WIN.



No need to thank me, really. I do these things as a public service.

Some of my favorite newspaper comics are on a roll. Yesterday's Dilbert was sheer brilliance:

( See? )

And then today's Get Fuzzy made me laugh out loud:

( Told you... )

I laughed out loud on both counts, and I almost never do that.

ETA: Okay, and now I've just laughed aloud for a third time, thanks to this little comment at the end of today's Josh Reads Comics entry:

Apropos of nothing, a few months ago the future Mrs. C. and I were cooling off in a wading pool at Paramount's Great America when we saw someone walk by with a giant inflatable chunk of Spider-Man merchandising. She pointed out that it's pretty hilarious to pronounce "Spider-Man" like it's a Jewish last name, with the last syllable de-emphasized. As in, "Oy, why do we have to have Passover at the Spidermans every year? There's always this weird webbing stuff in the haroset."

*dies*

Ooh, an update on the Mage: The Hero Discovered movie! I really, really hope this one gets into production soon, because if they get the script and the casting right, it could be amazing.

GIP? Why, no, not at all...

Headline: Disney Touchstone Greenlights Live-Action Movie Adaptation of Matt Wagner's Mage.

Excuse me while I scream in fangirl delight: squeeeeeeeee!!! Mage: The Hero Discovered was only, like, my favorite comic ever. And Mirth was only one of my favorite characters ever. And Matt Wagner is actually in on this project, they're consulting him all the time, so there's actually a chance that they might get this thing right...