My friend and author Gail Carriger is coming to town if a book signing and presentation.
This is special for me as Gail is the first person I’ve personally known who has gone fromt he ranks of unpublished novelist to published.
Of course being Gail she didn’t just stroll across that dividing line, she blew across it in style writing the very well received Soulless, and followed it up the New York Times Bestseller, Changeless. The third book in the series, Blameless comes out in September and to promote that book one of the place she will be stopping is San Diego’s very own, Mysterious Galaxy.

I am so looking forward to her visit in September.

…But what will happened when it gets here.

Statistician Nate Silver places the odds of a Republican taker-over of the House at about 50%, lower than I would have expected . I wish we had the aggregate polling data from 1994 because I would love to see an apples to apples comparison on the generic ballot.

One thing that we are not seeing that a lot of people told me we would see is that passing healthcare reform would send people packing to vote the Democrats out of power. That a vote for HCR was in effect a vote for the Democrats to cut their own throats.

While HCR is still more unpopular than it is popular, there has been no swing against it and in fact support for it has been rising.

Sop if November comes and the Democrats hold on to the House by a seat or two, what does that mean?

So Cawdor is very nearly finished in its first draft form. I am working on Chapter 25 and that is the final chapter of the book. It is unlikely that I will finish it tomorrow, but I’ll probably have the chapter more than half done by the end of the day.

It has proved to be an interesting trip. I learned quite a bit writing this novel.

I learned I don’t know what my books are about until I actually write them.

I learned that I do not accept that Macbeth is the villain of the play.

I learned that I liked doing a ‘rolling edit’ better than writing the entire novel and then having 300-400 pages to edit. It also gave my brain time to process story elements while I edited so I think I turned out a stronger plot and set of characters.

I learned I love my outlines, but I’m not afraid to walk of the path when the story goes somewhere else. The outline shows me the end point so I am free to explore along the way.

Today is also the official 1 year anniversary of me submitted Love & Loyalty to a major publisher. I know that this is how the biz works. If you do not have an agent you wait and wait and wait. Sort like the DMV but you can get on with your life while you wait.

For anyone who had to sit through the horrid mess that was Spiderman 3, please enjoy a more proper and much better written version of that movie…

Made good progress on Cawdor today. 2200 words closer to the end. All that’s left is the big fight and resolution afterwards. I have decided to hold back  a little information from the final version of the ending. Hopefully it will still be satisfying without being a cliff-hanger.

Here’s an interesting and short debate on if the Green movement should embrace nuclear power.

I am pro-nuclear power and remained so after the debate. I do not think the anti-nuke debater presented a very strong case. he played to fear not reason, and I thought he was very disingenuous about the construction times (treating them like constants not subject to political will.) or the footprint issue for wind.

Both side distorted the footprint of wind power, but I think the anti-nuke side distorted more by only counting the actual size of the towers. Please.

But here, watch for yourself.

I have thing I want to say, but I have work to do for my day-job. You know that job that actually pets money in the bank and keep the house out of foreclosure.

On the other job, I have two chapters left to finish the first draft of Cawdor. I suppose I should make up my mind how I am going to end it.

To all the Fathers out there, salutation on this day. My own father died when I was young so this day doesn’t have the same punch for me as it might for most people. However I have brother who are fathers and I wish them and their families the very best.

My sweetie-wife did surprise me with a father’s day gift even though I am not and never will be a father to anything except fiction. She got me the blu0ray collection of the entire run of The Prisoner. It has the original episodes, restored and in their HD glory. (The show like most dramatic programming was shot on film so it does benefit from the High Def treatment.)

The set also come with about 3 hours of bonus material including a 90 minute documentary on the show covering just about every aspect of production.

All in all a very cool gift and a very nice day.

Well I have written more than 80,000 words on Cawdor and I do expect the novel to come in at around 90,000 words.

After this draft is done I’ll do a light edit pass, then hand it off to my sweetie-wife for a copy-edit/proof-reading pass. THEN it will be ready for the beat readers.

Now to find beat-readers…..

Everyday I drive home past Gilman Drive, but my geek-mind insists it muct be Gill-Man (The Creature From Ther Black Lagoon) drive.

Well, if there was a gill-man Scrips would be in the front of the line to study him.

Not as quickly as I had hoped, but I am making progress on Cawdor.

The end is in sight and I can tick off on one hand the major points/events remain in the story-arc. I have one last major decisions — how much to reveal at the end — and that I will finalize when I get there.

After this, I will print a hardy copy of the entire first draft. Read and lightly edit it (heavy editing has been done as part of the writing process.) Correct it and then turn it over to my sweetie-wife for final proof-read. She’s terrific at spotting those errors that slip through.

Almost time to enlisted beta-readers for the manuscript.

We’ll see how people take to this unconventional approach to Macbeth