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Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Merry Christmas, Hanukah Blessings, and for that matter, Season's Greetings, whatever that means.
We can wish the same for the Republic.
Thanks to your generosity I have been able to keep this place up, I think to some effect, and I hope to contribute to the general understanding of technology and society. With your help I'll continue.
I have also been able to make notes on The Mask on the Wall, an account of surviving brain cancer; I hope to have a full outline proposal in Spring. I have collected a lot of background material, and I'll get to more.
Mamelukes has been the long pole in the tent. I have 120,000 words, and I expect it to be done at under 130,000. I had hoped to be finished by now; I still have some hopes of finishing the first draft by the end of the year. Given the way I work, the first draft is pretty well the final -- like Hemingway, I always start well back in the text and rewrite as I read before moving ahead. I got that technique from Hemingway's Movable Feast, and I like it; I doubt I would have done that in his day, but small computers have made this possible.
Niven and I have about 10,000 words of Lucifer's Anvil; we will start in on that in earnest as soon as Mamelukes ships, with luck in January.
I have notes and ideas for other projects once Mamelukes is done. One is the "Book List for Bright Technical People", a list of books I think educated people ought to read. Some are pretty standard, and once were assigned to everyone, often in high school. Others were influential in my life. It's not an onerous task, it's just that I don't seem to get as much done now as I used to do. The days aren't as long, and chores take longer. Again thanks to my patrons I don't have to grub for freelance projects, what many writers call potboilers, and I can put maintenance of the site as the task just below fiction. That makes me one of the most fortunate writers I know of; at my age many writers are forced to grub harder than ever. I even get to take a day off once in a while.
It has been a good year. I'm pretty well recovered from the radiation sickness. The permanent effects on memory are mild -- it takes longer to think of a word, sometimes, and many name including the names of my own characters escape me (even though I do not seem to have lost count of their personalities and driving emotions so the work doesn't suffer). It takes longer to set up scenes and get the details right. Once that is done I can write as fast as ever, and I don't have the distractions of grubbing about to keep the pot boiling.
So: thanks again to all of you, and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Chaos Manor
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