I will eventually come back to that story, because I yearn for it, too, and it's really good to be reminded from time to time that I'm not the only one.
Right now, the Big Book is on hold. I need to get the third Rugosa story finished so the print volume can happen.
My notion is that, once that's squared away, I'll get back to the Little Book, a prequel set two centuries earlier. I don't know if you remember the Bastard Traitor of Imlen, that historical figure who keeps popping up as a folk hero of the Old Beltresins and as a cautionary tale among the Beltresin aristocracy. She's the one Laurebes is writing his history about. Anyhow, the Little Book is about her (with short interludes from Laurebes's biography between chapters from her POV).
I got it about two thirds of the way to a complete working draft when two things knocked me off the project: the Rugosa Coven project started taking off, and I had a catastrophic hard drive failure in the wake of which I discovered that backing up my files assiduously is only as good as the equipment I back them up on. Lost a year of work on the Little Book. That was a year ago. I'm still shell-shocked about it. Stuff I hadn't been working on in over two years, I could recover from a computer I'd retired but not recycled--all the notes and drafts toward the Big Book's sequels were safe there. Short stories I'd been sending out to magazines or my critique group, and the current version of the Big Book, which I'd been sending to agents, I was able to recover from attachments in my gmail sent folder. Anything I'd been working on in the previous two years that wasn't yet ready to show to anyone...all that stuff was just gone, despite the fact that I'd been backing up my work every day.
The Little Book has several jobs: 1) Be Fun. 2) Be Short. 3) Sell. 4) Sell the Big Book.
I think it can do all those things. I just need to do right by the Rugosa folks for a while first.
I tried getting into the new translation of War and Peace, since I've only read short stuff by Tolstoy before. I really liked it, but the physical difficulty of wrangling both a toddler and a 10 pound hardback proved daunting. Maybe later I can get back to Tolstoy.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Three Cheers for the Sprawling Epic!
Date: 2009-02-27 08:30 am (UTC)I will eventually come back to that story, because I yearn for it, too, and it's really good to be reminded from time to time that I'm not the only one.
Right now, the Big Book is on hold. I need to get the third Rugosa story finished so the print volume can happen.
My notion is that, once that's squared away, I'll get back to the Little Book, a prequel set two centuries earlier. I don't know if you remember the Bastard Traitor of Imlen, that historical figure who keeps popping up as a folk hero of the Old Beltresins and as a cautionary tale among the Beltresin aristocracy. She's the one Laurebes is writing his history about. Anyhow, the Little Book is about her (with short interludes from Laurebes's biography between chapters from her POV).
I got it about two thirds of the way to a complete working draft when two things knocked me off the project: the Rugosa Coven project started taking off, and I had a catastrophic hard drive failure in the wake of which I discovered that backing up my files assiduously is only as good as the equipment I back them up on. Lost a year of work on the Little Book. That was a year ago. I'm still shell-shocked about it. Stuff I hadn't been working on in over two years, I could recover from a computer I'd retired but not recycled--all the notes and drafts toward the Big Book's sequels were safe there. Short stories I'd been sending out to magazines or my critique group, and the current version of the Big Book, which I'd been sending to agents, I was able to recover from attachments in my gmail sent folder. Anything I'd been working on in the previous two years that wasn't yet ready to show to anyone...all that stuff was just gone, despite the fact that I'd been backing up my work every day.
The Little Book has several jobs:
1) Be Fun.
2) Be Short.
3) Sell.
4) Sell the Big Book.
I think it can do all those things. I just need to do right by the Rugosa folks for a while first.
I tried getting into the new translation of War and Peace, since I've only read short stuff by Tolstoy before. I really liked it, but the physical difficulty of wrangling both a toddler and a 10 pound hardback proved daunting. Maybe later I can get back to Tolstoy.