A thought

solarbird and I have had the pleasure a couple of times now of jamming with stealthcello at her place. As part of that experience, Betsy graciously allowed me to handle her new guitar, a loverly loverly thing that's not much bigger than Rags, actually, yet which has an astonishingly full sound. It's got a carbon-fiber body and it's just generally gorgeous. It and its various cousins live here, specifically the Cargo model.

As I have already resolved to get myself a guitar capable of holding its own against fair and crowd noise if Dara and I busk at Folklife next summer, this particular guitar model is calling my name. VERY LOUDLY. Especially the green Cargo. But oh my ack the price tag.

I am flirting with the very silly idea of, on Faerie Blood's release date, issuing the challenge that if I sell enough copies of the book to buy me one of those guitars, I will post video of myself playing it. As a backup plan, I could aim lower for one of the less spectacularly pretty but nonetheless severely kickass Seagull guitars, after having seen both auntmonkey and radarrider play them.

What do you think, folks? Sound like fun?

So yeah, Nanowrimo and stuff

It probably won't surprise any of you that I will not be formally participating in Nanowrimo this year, for much the same reasons as last year: i.e., nasty medical crap that's gone on this year, and still trying to polish off the novels I've already finished.

For those of you not following my working writing journal, or for those of you who are new to listening in, I have two novels in the editing queue:

Lament of the Dove: Epic fantasy, first of a trilogy. Think "muskets and magic" rather than "sword and sorcery". Currently under active query, although that's stalled a bit since I've been dealing with the aforementioned medical crap. I do however have an offer from an agent to reconsider the work if I edit it down hard. So my main goal here is word count reduction; ideally, I need to pull this book down under 120K.

Queen of Souls: Not queryable yet. Urban fantasy, with Greek gods, a sequel to the Hades and Persephone myth. The second draft is now finally underway in earnest, but needs to get some serious legs under it, ideally by the end of the year. I'd like this one out there getting queried along with Lament by the time Faerie Blood comes out.

Which leads me to thinking that instead of doing a Nanowrimo, I should be doing a Nanoedmo instead this year. The two goals here would be pulling Lament down under 120K, and getting as much progress done on Queen of Souls as possible.

I'm feeling ambitious. Let's see if I can pull this off. For those of you tackling Nanowrimo in earnest, good luck to you all!