The Middle of the Dark

Which Buffy the Vampire Slayer Character Are You? Created by BuddyTV I found this interesting because like everyone else I have novels that sleep away, not quite in trunks, but drawers or computer files waiting for the light of day. I especially found Amanda Craig's entry funny, because I too have a big damn space opera on deck, and it too has its roots in The Tempest. Though it doesn't seem as literal as hers does. My favorite cocktail: apocalypse, feminism, and literary vs. genre.

Heartbreakingly sad.

Commence the Peanuts Happy Dance: I've sold my first novel, The Book of Elizabeth , to Sean Wallace at Prime Books . It will appear in hardcover in early 2009. You can read more details here . I see there's also a little blurb at SFScope . The novel takes place in a world where none of our history - none of it - occured. No Roman Empire, no Reformation, no Berlin Wall. No Berlin. A new history has taken its place, except for one little problem: people from our history inexplicably find themselves swept into this alien one, people from all eras of history, poets and gladiators. Poets and queens. One of them is Queen Elizabeth I. As a girl, she hand copied passages of the Bible for her step-mother; now, Elizabeth writes out a copy of the entire book from memory, to keep her own sanity in this strange new world, a world where Moses never went to the mountain, and Jesus never to the cross. Elizabeth learns to cope, to embrace the virgin world; yet she can't avoid her ...

Happy belated new year. I began it with much sickness. I'm still pretty under the weather but I am up and walking around and also at work with such a thin voice a man actually called me 'some Arab' today. I informed him kindly I spoke English and could give him lessons if necessary, as he did not seem to recognize it. Teacher and author Martin Roper has an interview at the Dublin Quarterly. My novel mutates. I think it wants to be a Miyazaki film. Or an Elseworlds graphic novel. (Gaslight Batman or something.) It takes place in a world slightly - slightly maybe isn't strong enough - different version of our world. The history is different, but contaminated. The polluters are people from our history, and the most toxic bit of 'waste' is a document utterly integral to our history, and utterly alien to theirs. My research has led me pretty far from the path I thought I was going down, so there's been some stops and starts, but overall I'm pretty ...

You're just a freak, like me. The writing is very slow and frustrating. Lots of thinking and figuring. I write fast, but I take time to gather material. Everything becomes material. Filtering becomes an issue. Add to that I desperately need a title for this novel and nothing seems to work. My head has been ringing with headaches for days. I went to see I Am Legend on Saturday, and while not legendary, was very good. The cinematography of abandoned NYC was extraordinary, and featured the best CGI work I've ever seen in any film. The movie went back on itself in the end, but Will Smith was excellent and understated in what was essentially a one man play.

Somehow it's December 9th. Somehow it's December. I shouldn't be surprised because of all the snow and ice on the ground. Writing has been good but slow. I go in spurts. I wrote a new short story, which I'm letting marinate for now, and I'm about 80 pages into the novel (91 or so if you count stuff I've generated - scraps of fabric I'll hopefully be able to use later) which I should be very happy about, considering. I'm in a thinking/considering/exploring phase and generally I don't get a lot of pages down during these periods. I don't outline, I discover things as I write and this is the downside of doing that: sometimes you hit a dead end and have to turn back and go the other way. Best to explore all paths, though. I saw The Golden Compass yesterday. I was really looking forward to it, and it was entertaining in a general epic fantasy kind of way, but the script rushed through just about everything. It's far too talky (show don...