Friday, August 15, 2014

Funny Things, Final Revision, Things Happening Next Week, and a New Blade's Edge Chapter

First of all, for the impatient, here's the link to the newest Blade's Edge Chapter.

So, on Tuesday of this week a humorous thing happened to me in the world of the interwebs. This whole full time writing gig has meant getting a lot more involved in social media, something that I'm not sure I like, but certainly see the benefit of, and occasionally even enjoy. I am now on twitter (if you're on twitter too you can find me @gwendamned). There are many things that I do not like about twitter, but one of the things I do like about twitter is that Neil Gaiman is on it. Neil Gaiman is one of my all time favorite authors and he spends far too much of his time on twitter, which is nice for those of us that follow him on twitter but perhaps frustrating for those that spend time with him in person. I wouldn't know, I've never had the pleasure of hanging out with him in person.

But on Tuesday morning I was checking my twitter feed while lying in bed (yep, there are some definite perks to being self employed) and I saw that Mr. Gaiman had posted the following:
About to try and have a Mac that stays at home and a Mac that goes on the road with me. Is there an easy way to sync them? Or sync an ID?
So, I looked at that and thought, oh hey, I could actually say something useful on the topic so perhaps I'll reply. But, before I replied I thought, you know, probably a lot of people have already chimed in. I'll just check and see if someone already said what I was going to say. And, apparently, a few hundred people had already given their two cents. So, instead, I wrote the following:
I was going to reply with useful information, but I see that the entire internet already beat me to it. 
And I patted myself on the shoulder for being cute and went about my morning. Then, I picked up my phone a few minutes later to see if I had any new messages and found that my inbox had no fewer than 15 updates from twitter in it.

Mr. Gaiman retweeted my tweet (for those that don't use twitter, here's a lovely article on what all of these things mean) to his 2.5 million followers and then my internet exploded. At least it did for me. Keep in mind that being fairly new to twitter, and not spending that much time cultivating followers (for example, I don't follow people back automatically) I have only 50 followers, and anything I am likely to do on twitter is unlikely to reach that many people unless it gets retweeted by someone else. So, Neil Gaiman retweeted my tweet, and then a bunch of his followers favorited it, and some of them retweeted it, and at least ten of them decided to follow me. Oh, and did I mention that I actually had 40 followers before that whole thing happened. So yeah, one retweet from Neil Gaiman resulted in a 25% increase in my twitter power. Dang.

So... That was amusing. Another funny thing? ('Cause the title does say 'funny things' after all.) Here's a picture of my dog licking peanut butter out of a jar.


Wow, that's really not a great picture is it? Hmm... 

How about this video of me taking the dog sledding?

Well, anyway, funny things aside. I have finally strapped myself in to doing the final revision of Gwendamned (really it's the write-in of the final revision, I did the bulk of the heavy lifting a while ago). Which is really very exciting because when it is done I will, for the first time ever, have taken a full length novel all the way to completion. That isn't to say that if some editor tells me I need to do something to it that it won't change once more, but this revision is the one at the end of which I say, "It's done. It's a book, not a draft. Let it go out into the world." When I finish I will be sending it out to the publisher who originally expressed interest in it and we will go from there. Yay!

In the meantime, I have suspended work on all other projects (don't worry I front loaded a bunch of  Blade's Edge chapters first, so I'll still post them on Tuesdays and Fridays and you'll still read them as normal) but I already wrote them so that I can just focus on Gwendamned until it's done.

So, things happening next week: I will be posting an interview with the talented, independent author AE Marling. AE Marling is the author of the Lands of Loam Series. A very entertaining fantasy series with some wonderful characters and intriguing plot lines. You can find whole series over at amazon.com and the first book in the series, Brood of Bones, is free for kindle. Next week you'll get to read all about the author and the series itself.

And finally, with slightly more fanfare than at the top of the post: NEW BLADE'S EDGE CHAPTER!!

After her plans get thrown into fast forward Mishi must find a way to to get to Katagi before the Elder Council does...

Chapter 27, aka Part Three: Chapter 11, is up and ready to read.

I'm going to go back to my revision cave. See you all next week!


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