Hello.
I’ve been away, haven’t I?
I’d
like to tell you where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, but I can’t. I will
almost certainly get sued. So I’m going to describe what’s been going on in
very general, non-suable terms. And I do mean very general.
There
has been a problem. Part of the problem is a person (well, a couple of people),
and part of it is technical. It has been a very stressful problem to deal with.
And the long and the short of it is that dealing with this problem has sucked
up so much of my time and energy that I am way, way behind on getting the second volume of Masks written. As in waking up one morning and muttering, “Ye gods,
what month is it?”
So,
because I don’t think it’s really fair to make you guys wait forever to find
out what happens to Rae and Trevor, we’re going to try a little experiment.
Waaaaaaay
back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was first writing Masks for my friends in high school, it
was a monthly series. One short story per month, usually written within two
weeks of the due date. In some ways, I enjoyed that—I got near-instant feedback
on my characters, my stories, all of it. It was good training. One of the
reasons I went back to writing serials was that I wanted that feedback, and
that interaction with readers.
Now,
the first volume of Masks was written
in almost total isolation—no feedback from anyone but the beta readers. So I’m
going to try something a little different this time. I’m not going to be
writing and posting a chapter a week—there’s too much that can go wrong with a
schedule that tight, to say nothing of how nasty it is to revise that close to
writing time—but I’m going to break the story down into four chunks, and write
and revise one chunk at a time. That means that if something is going massively
wrong in the first quarter of the story—the first six chapters—you’ll have a
chance to weigh in down in the comments and tell me I’m screwing things up, and
see how I deal with that in the next quarter.
Because,
you see, I can’t get a whole novel written in a hurry. But I can do a quarter
pretty fast.
So
here’s how it’s going to work. If I have my way, there will be something Masks-related up on Pocket
Coyote on September 10. Why September 10? Because I used to release new Masks stories on the tenth of every
month, and it seems appropriate that I go back to a more interactive format on
that date. Now, I’m not going monthly here—we’re still doing Wednesday chapters,
even though September 10 is a Monday. But there will be something on September 10—maybe a short story, maybe the first
chapter of Volume 2, maybe both—and something—either
the first or second chapter of Volume 2—on Wednesday, September 12. And then
we’re on Wednesdays.
Think
I can do this? I’m a little scared, to tell you the truth, but I’ve been
dealing with Teh Problem for way too long. It’s time to solve Teh Problem in
the only way I know how—by doing something absolutely batshit crazy.
That’s
where the photo at the top of this blog entry comes in. I picked up a
four-inch-high Bucky Barnes action figure for good luck, and was playing around
with him yesterday. Call him the patron saint of batshit crazy, mostly because
of one of my favorite moments from his brief tenure as Captain America. One of
his early outings in the costume ended with a villain firing a rocket launcher
at a presidential candidate (who was actually working with the bad guys, but
superheroes don’t get to be picky about things like that). Bucky, whose
unofficial motto might be “Always lead with your face”, took bullet-catching to
a new level and blocked the path of the rocket … from midair … with the shield.
There was a large explosion and Bucky landed very hard on top of a parked car.
All of
that led up to this magnificent panel:
Now if
that’s not a valediction, I don’t know what is!
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