Whispers

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I’m getting ready to leave. TV off, ceiling fans off. Windows, closed. It’s quiet on the third floor. I turn off the lamp in my office, the last light on the third floor that was on.

I hear a door shut on the second floor. I thought I was alone in the house.

Whispers. Close. On the stairway. Halfway up. I freeze. The whispers continue. I imagine they’re whispering that I’m coming.

“Hello?” I say. It was instinctual. A bad line straight from of a horror movie.

“Just me,” my roommate calls from the second floor. The whispers stop. “I’m headed out.”

Speaking of Clouds, How about Some Words?

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I won’t bother telling you that I’ve finished Accidental Intelligence again. We’ve all been down that path together too many times. I will tell you, however, that I started querying once more.

It’s a rough time of year to query because many agents stop taking submissions this quarter, but we’ll see what we see. I have what I think is a good query letter, and Q really helped me polish the holy heck out of my manuscript. Between her and D. A. Del Castillo, not to mention my great betas, I’ve had some remarkable help.

Anyhoo, I ran my final manuscript through Wordle.net—which is just far too cool—and got this awesome word cloud. In other words, here’s my novel in a nutshell. Now, if I could just get a TextArc of it…

What are words for? (Click for a larger image)

What are words for? (Click for a larger image)

A Giant Cotton Candy Cloudship Enterprise

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I was driving back from Vegas after CES back in January—in southeast California to be precise—and there was this killer cloud formation. It looked a lot like a spaceship. A giant cotton candy Enterprise. I posted one pic to Instagram—shown below—but threatened to post more of them on my blog. Nine months later, let’s do it!

One caveat: I like these pics, but they don’t do justice to what I saw that evening. The textures and swirls and layers that were in this formation…I’ve never seen anything like it before.

Here’s the Instagram post. I upped the brightness and lowered the contrast for the post:

Fiddle About

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ZOMG, but Giorgio A. Tsoukalos is one of my guilty pleasures. First on Ancient Aliens and various standalone UFO specials, and now on his own show, a reboot of Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of…I love this guy. In fact, if there’s a show on H2 where the answer to every question asked by the narrator is “No!” Mr. Tsoukoalos is probably involved, and I love them all.

Right now, I’m watching the In Search Of… episode dedicated to Puma Punku. This place fascinates me. I reject the conclusions reached on every show I’ve seen about the site—i.e. that aliens built it thousands of years ago—but it’s an amazing site.

"Puma Punku landscape" by Janikorpi - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puma_Punku_landscape.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Puma_Punku_landscape.JPG

“Puma Punku landscape” by Janikorpi – Own work.
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

So, anyway. I’m fiddling about. I’m also fiddling about with the theme of my blog. I’m looking for something modern and modern that I can install myself. I haven’t found it yet, but you may see a few different looks here at GeekTells while I’m looking.

I’m also in the home stretch of my final edit on my book. I should be querying in a couple of weeks. That is, if I can stop fiddling about.

Scattershot: Writing Update, Guitar Show, Cherokee Purple Tomatoes

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I know, it’s been roughly forever since my last update. I’ve been working quite hard on my novel(s), and I have a new query letter that’s almost ready to go out. I’ve also been working very hard at TMO, and have resumed my original role there as editor-in-chief.

It’s made for a very, very busy me, and updating my blog has was one area that suffered accordingly.

Querying

Some of you might remember that I queried my novel before, roughly two years ago. I’ve explained all that, but with the newly completed novel came the need for a new query letter. This time around I hunkered down for some help from the Query Letter Hell thread at the Absolute Write forums, and it was fucking brutal.

But thanks to the awesome folks there, I have a brand new query letter all ready to go. I hope to send it out in early September, starting with some of the agents I queried the first time around.

Stick a Fork in It (Again)

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I am delighted to announce that my book is finished. Again. I know, I said that before. OK, I’ve said it twice, but I think it will stick this time. I am ready to shop this puppy. Again.

20140512Shutterstock-Book-Fork

Mayhaps I should explain: a few months ago I finished the book and got it out to beta readers. Based on their feedback, I decided to tweak the ending.

That ended up being much harder than I was anticipating, and I ended up writing some 24,000 words for what ultimately became a 2,600 word tweak. Just imagine me at an old-fashioned typewriter hammering out page after page after page of story that went straight into the trash.

I’ve been working on that for weeks, and then I went through the manuscript again to trim it down to my goal of 120,000 words. Tonight I made the last edits I intend to make, at least until an agent or editor asks for changes

What’s in a Year?

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It’s been an interesting year in very many ways, but I decided to use Tax Day to look back at what’s most important. My hair.

Yeah, I know. I haven’t updated my blog in something like 5 months, and now I’m back talking about my hair. That’s how I roll. Besides, lookit:

20140415bryan-over-a-year

A year ago, 6 months ago, and a week or so ago

in thirteen or so months, I’ve gone from metrosexual wannabe to a William Shakespeare impersonator, with a pitstop trying out for Beck’s band in between. I also stopped coloring my hair, so there’s that.

While we’re talking about me, check out this photo my friend Jim Tanous took at Cirque du Mac 11 from the year’s Macworld/iWorld. If you like it, we posted a whole gallery of his photos of the Macworld All Star Band at The Mac Observer. Jim is a heckuva a photographer, a gifted writer, and a great guy.

Scattershot: The Doctor, Bitcoins, Moving Forward

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Things have been pretty busy in these parts (while I eagerly await feedback from more beta readers), which makes it a good time to write a Scattershot post.

The Doctor

First up is Doctor Who, and the 50th Anniversary episode (also the 799th episode) called “The Day of the Doctor.” It aired this past Saturday, and it was very cool. No spoilers outside of trailer-level stuff, but the gist of the episode is that the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) and Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) get all up in each other’s business. Crossed time streams ensue, and Jenna Coleman’s delightful smile is there to keep us happy.

If you didn’t watch it, look for it in rerun on BBC America here in the States. It’s also showing in 3D in some theaters. I haven’t seen that version, but Jeff Gamet did (earlier tonight), and he said it was pretty nifty.

Oh, and can I please have a spin-off of John Hurt as the War Doctor? Yes, please!

Off to the Beta Readers…

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It’s weird. Really weird, but I don’t have anything that I can—or even should—do to my book, and that’s because I’ve sent it to a few beta readers. While I still have 1,000 more words to cut, I need to let it sit before I go through it for what is probably the 50th time.

And with that last pass, I was pretty pleased with it. I feel like it’s close, but as I mentioned last week, no one but my trusted critique partner has seen 70 or so percent of it, so now it’s time to find out what some other people think.

20131117dontquityourdayjob

Until I hear back from them, there’s nothing I can do. I don’t want to make any changes, not even axing a few unnecessary words, because the betas might find a major problem or have some excellent comments and suggestions. I want to be able to consider their feedback working from the same manuscript they’re commenting on.

Like I said, it’s weird. For three years, there hasn’t been a single day when there wasn’t something I could work on. From writing it to editing it to refining it to trimming it down, there has always been something to do. Even when I thought I was finished two years ago, I was working on the second half of the story (what I thought then would be a second book).

Buried in Words

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I got yelled at on Twitter for not having updated my blog since…July. That was in October, and here it is November, so I might be doing this wrong.

Never you mind! Onwards and upwards! Storm the castle! Hip! Hip! Hooey! No time like the present, said Bryan. Never.

So what have I been doing with my time? Lots. And lots.

For one thing, I’ve been tink, tink, tinkering away at my manuscript. Back in July, I mentioned I was done, but had 35,000 words to cut. since then, I’ve added another 3,000 words in the process of rewriting and honing the ending, but I’ve cut a net of 36,300 words, leaving me at 121,699 words as of right now. If you remember, my goal is an even 120,000 words, or less.

Counting Words

Counting Words