Tim Pratt's Blog, page 13

Hope y'all had a happy fourth of July (those who celebrate, anyway). We had a lazy day here at the PrattShaw house, with a stroll to get ice cream cones in the afternoon, then my sister-in-law and nephew came over to eat large quantities of grilled meats at dinnertime. The boys had a fairly epic watergun fight. I had to run an errand after dinner, so I biked downtown and back in the cool evening air. Biking: still fun.

Our kid freaked out a bit around 9 p.m., from the noise of all the fireworks — he was terrified, didn't know what was going on, etc. We soothed him and explained about fireworks and told him it was just people celebrating, and he seemed to get it. Took him a while to fall asleep, though. The plus side of him being up until 10 p.m.: he slept until 7:30 a.m. today!

My wife and I watched some Doctor Who, finishing last year's season (good stuff), and otherwise frolicked. A lovely night, overall.

Dance with Dragons is good. I'm a bit over halfway through. The urge to blow off writing today and just finish reading it is mighty, but I must be strong.

I wrote about 1500 words on City of the Fallen Sky yesterday, bringing my vacation total to 13,500. I'm still about 7500 words behind schedule, though. (I realize perhaps I have not explained this schedule I keep mentioning. To meet my deadline, and to have ten days or so to revise the book before turning it in, I calculated that I needed to average 1500 words a day in June and July. I did quite well through most of June for the first 20 days of the month. Then a combination of deadline week at work and having a houseguest knocked my productivity way down. Now, I don't mind — I loved having my friend D here! — but it does mean I have to make up those missed days. Hence this day-job vacation week, so I can focus on fiction. Bare minimum, I should be back on schedule by the end of this week. But I would dearly love to actually get ahead of schedule.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday, awesomeness was also achieved. Things began a bit inauspiciously: the child woke my wife at around 5 a.m., so rather than the two of them gallivanting off for the morning while I wrote (as planned), my wife went back to bed for a while to catch up on her sleep. What with one thing and another, it was well after 1 p.m. before I had time and quiet for writing, and mid-afternoon is not my best period in which to get work done: mostly, that time of day, I want to nap.

But I managed to get about 2500 words written, in between some housecleaning, a quick trip to the grocery store, and other distractions.

My wife took her shiny new bike out for a ride, with a rented trailer attached to pull the boy along, and they had a fabulous time. Around 5 she biked over to the rental place to return the trailer… but the boy had fallen asleep in it. The prospect of dragging her bike and a cranky, sleep-interrupted child to the bus stop and riding said bus home did not appeal, so she called me for a rescue. I drove over and transferred the boy to the car seat (he didn't even wake up). My wife kindly took over driving back so I could ride the bike home, as I'd been cooped up inside working for most of the afternoon, and as a result missed a really beautiful summer day.

I haven't ridden a bicycle in years. So fun! It's a good bike, too. The journey was only about four miles, so it didn't take long. I wished for a longer trip. Berkeley is very bicycle-friendly. All the annoying chicanes and circles and weird signs restricting traffic that are so annoying in a car are wonderful on a bicycle. It's lovely to sail past a big red DO NOT ENTER sign, with its smaller "Emergency Vehicles and Bicycles Excepted" sign underneath.

I mean, I could do without some of the hills, and it'll be a while before I'm comfortable biking on some of the main streets, but overall, this is a good city to start bicycling in again. (Don't worry, this won't become a bike blog. It's my wife's bike, and it's mostly for her new in-town commute, so I won't be riding it much anyway.) If only I could bike to work… but there's not a gear low enough to get me to the top of a hill that steep, and riding down would be essentially like falling off a cliff and rapidly reaching terminal velocity. The brakes would be reduced to ash by friction after day one.

Oh, and then in the evening I did some more writing, and managed about 5,300 words total. So now instead of being 16,000 words behind schedule, I'm only 11,000 words behind! A few more good days and I'll be in an excellent position.

And I finished The Heroes (pretty good, but Best Served Cold is still my favorite), and am now well into A Dance with Dragons. (It is good.) Also watched some Doctor Who with my wife, the one where a character gets his entire existence retroactively erased. Ouch. What a way to go. I made a joke about balefire, which my wife did not understand. I am too geeky even for my own true love. Oh well.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Today I:

Did a load of laundry

Washed dishes

Read and sent corrections for the page proofs of Briarpatch (order early and often!)

Wrote 1400 words of book reviews

And here's why this is impressive: I did all this while solo parenting a three-year-old. Read page proofs between bouts of Lego building and pretending to be a witch. Did laundry while he ate peanut-butter-and-jelly. Wrote book reviews while he read picture books and played with building blocks at the library. Talked on the phone while helping him go potty (er, sorry, co-workers). And I even played with the kid at the playground and had a picnic lunch with him, too, so he didn't end up feeling too ignored.

Fortunately, he fell asleep, so now I get to sit in the yard and read for an hour or so.

A lot of days, I fail. Today, I win.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

My vacation starts today! No day job work until Friday, July 8. (I know, going in to work for one day before a weekend is weird, but that's the magazine life for you — some deadlines could only be put off for so long.)

Now, I don't know what you people do on your vacations, probably kite surfing and boar hunting and snow diving and such, but here's what I'm going to do:

Write two book reviews — also, like, today.

Do final edits for my Wizards of the Coast novel.

Write as many words as humanly possible on my book City of the Fallen Sky, which needs another 40,000 words or so written in the next three weeks.

Yeah, so on vacation: I work. But writing and editing is noticeably easier when you don't spend 9 hours at a day job before said writing and editing, so it should be an improvement on most of my days. I'll also try to pop in here frequently to let y'all know how things are going.

It won't be all bad, though. I can't work all the time. Some other things I'll do, if all goes according to plan:

Read Dance with Dragons

Play hide-and-seek with my kid

Hang out with my wife

Cook delicious meat over a charcoal fire

Drink margaritas

Go swimming

Sit in my yard reading and drinking beer

So there might be some vacation in there after all. But, mostly, writing.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

My dear friend Dawson (AKA "D," "D-Lite," "Commander D", "Vitamin D," "The D-Fenestrator," "Freelance Spiritual Adviser and Minister of War," etc.) is visiting soon, for the first time in, what, 18 months? He's arriving late Thursday (if the travel gods are kind) and staying with us for a week. It will be a week of awesome. For complex and boring issues related to the magazine production schedule at my day job, I can't take any vacation days while he's here, but I'm juggling my schedule around to maximize free time, aligning my usual days off into a glorious four-day run of freedom. I'm sure for portions of it I'll even be sober.

D is our kid's godfather (don't worry, our kid also has a sciencefather), and the boy is very excited to see his "Uncle D" again. We've already promised River that D will read him Sandra Boynton's Barnyard Dance and act out all the dance moves. (We haven't told D this yet, but he'll roll with it. He's good like that.)

Dawson is the world's greatest houseguest. (Well, I guess maybe there are houseguests who fill your cupboards with golden coins and delicious ham, leaving you fabulously wealthy and sated by pork during their visit? But other than such hypothetical houseguests, yeah, D is the best.) The house is actually *cleaner* when he leaves. He decreases entropy by his very existence. (Except the fun kinds of entropy.) It's like: who needs a vacation, when D is visiting? His mere presence is a vacation.

Friends like that are a treasure to be treasured by any and all who treasure treasure.

(Anyway, if you don't hear from me much in the next week, that's why. I'll be busy discussing the finer points of Stephen King trivia, watching D and my wife do Aikido in the yard, listening to my kid giggle uncontrollably, and stealing D's french fries. Is there anything better than a friend who never finishes his fries?)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Behold! The trailer for a short film by Shir Comay based on my Hugo Award-winning story "Impossible Dreams."

(If that embedded video doesn't play for you, try this link instead.)

I've seen a not-quite-final cut of the whole film, and it's really lovely, retaining much that I love about my own story without being a literal or slavish adaptation, and with the director's personal vision shining through.

So: how cool! The first film inspired by my work! And it's a movie of a story that's all about movies. (So meta.)

A couple of years ago the director got in touch and asked if he could make a short, non-commercial Hebrew-language film, and my agents and I said, sure. To be honest, I wasn't expecting much — I figured it would be a couple of the director's college roommates as actors, mumbling their lines into the camera. Instead he got the marvelous Ayala Zilberman and Ori Yaniv, who do an awesome job. It's going to be in the Jerusalem Film Festival, and the director plans to submit it to some international festivals as well.

I've been full of "Whee!" about this for a week. Hope you all enjoy the trailer, and if and when it's possible to point you toward the full film, I will.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

Linky times y'all.

First, check out Tiger Bright Studios, Jenn Reese's new design company specializing in e-book covers. Jenn's work is made of ten kinds of awesome, and her prices are quite competitive.

Shadow Unit just concluded their 3rd season of awesomeness. Go give the writers some money so they can do season 4 without going broke. And if you haven't read it, and you like serial killer / behavioral analysis / forensic profiling / supernatural / police procedural stuff, you've got some wonderful stories ahead of you.

Get Michael Canfield's awesomely weird e-book collection 419 Memoirs & Other Strange Stories at Amazon.com in Kindle format or at B&N.com for the Nook. I wrote the introduction. Mike's one of my favorite writers of weird fiction, and this is a book of his weirdest.

(Yes, I used a variant of "awesome" in all those paragraphs; this is not bad writing, but an indication that awesomeness is my THEME.)

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I have a to-do list. Maybe it's of interest as a list of things writers have to do that don't involve spinning fanciful tales of might-have-been and never-could-be (with optional monsters and explosions)? Or maybe I'm just posting it so I'll stop forgetting things and putting them off. You may never know!

Write and record a brief piece about Welcome to Bordertown for a podcast (must happen tonight!)

Look over a proofreader's comments and see if I want to make any more changes to Briarpatch (by Thursday morning!)

Finish this Conrad Williams novel so I can review it

Write a review of Eutopia by David Nickle

Create covers and format more short stories for sale as e-books

This is in addition to doing the edits for my Wizards of the Coast novel, which should be appearing in my inbox shortly. And of course writing the remaining 50,000 words of City of the Fallen Sky by the August 1 due date. Then I have two stories to write in August, and one story to write in September, and of course another novel due in February 2012, and there are a couple of other projects percolating that might actually happen…

Plus, you know. Full-time job at a magazine. Marriage. Fatherhood. Etc.

It's good to keep busy. And, actually, the back half of this year is comparatively leisurely compared to, say, last year. I'm not feeling too terribly overwhelmed, yet. Though I do dream someday of taking vacation time for reasons other than finishing work on a novel…

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

It's another Wednesday, and that means, another installment in The Alphabet Quartet is up at Daily Science Fiction! This week it's one of my favorites, "V is for Vámonos." (Yes, we're aiming for the huge demographic of people who like Dora the Explorer and Conrad's Heart of Darkness.Though ideally it's an interesting weird story even if you haven't seen/read those.) I can't believe we've hit V already. The end is near. It's been a fun six months!

The good people at Escape Artists, home of the leading SF/Fantasy/Horror podcasts, are also releasing audio versions of the stories, plus some extras, as a fundraiser prize. But they've giving away free samples to entice you, so listen to them at Podcastle; and at Escape Pod; and at Pseudopod.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.

I've been putting a bunch of short stories up at Amazon and B&N as 99 cent e-books. Here are several stories at the Kindle store, and a few Marla Mason stories as well.

If you prefer the Nook format, you can find many of the stories there too!. And some Marla Mason stories there as well. I'll be adding more!

Jenn Reese designed the covers for "Life in Stone" and "Hart and Boot" (and for some of my upcoming e-stories too). She's an awesome designer, and I'm lucky to have her work make my fiction look good.

Originally published at Tim Pratt. You can comment here or there.