and then I said no, that would be a foolish choice, Mary Anne.
Remember that you got the booster vaccine on Tuesday, and you had a fever of 100F on Wednesday and felt pretty terrible all day (which is good, sign the vaccine is doing its thing, protecting me from worse down the road). So instead of pushing myself, I promptly went to bed after the board meeting, and I was asleep by 11.
Woke up at 4, realized I didn’t actually have to get up and dive into work, went back to sleep, woke up again at 8:30. Much more reasonable. Maybe I will take a nap as well, sometime today, and then I can stay up unreasonably late talking to people tonight…
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But now I’m tucked into my bed with a cup of hot caffeinated tea (I got a $5 giant glass of milk from room service last night, so I could have real milk in my tea), and I’m going to at least attempt to dive into revisions. I’m at what I hope is the last step of Liminal Space – I thought I was done last spring, and I even sent it to an agent (who passed), but I didn’t send it on to other agents, even though I had a list waiting. I realized I just didn’t feel like it was quite ready yet.
So I’m now doing what I typically do with my books – I do it with short stories, and did it with both Bodies in Motion and Tornado. I’m reading the whole damn thing out loud. And yes, it’s time consuming. Mostly I’m just cleaning up language as I go, making the prose tighter, getting rid of repetition and circumlocutions.
Sometimes it reveals bigger issues. I did the first chapter yesterday in the bar, and I already know that before I go on to the second chapter, I want to take one section that’s currently in summary, and put it in scene instead. Which is a little tedious, because I’m pretty sure it was in scene originally, but in the course of putting the book together, it got shifted to summary, and I know why I did that, but I think it was a mistake. Gah. So back in I go.
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I’m not exactly sure what I’m aiming towards. It’s not as if the book is likely to be perfect at the end of this process. But when I sent Bodies in Motion in, even though there were some minor editorial revisions after that, the book as a whole was pretty damn coherent – it had a shape, one I had spent four years hammering.
Maybe sanding is a better metaphor than hammering. When you’re making jewelry, you sand it as one of the final steps. You may end up sanding with ever finer grades of sandpaper (especially with resin work), aiming for a smooth shine. Nothing rough to catch the skin or the eye.
I want this book to be something you fall into, that just carries you along, compellingly. So here I go, sanding and polishing away. Assuming an agent or an editor picks it up, they may ask for big changes, and I might even do them, if they can convince me it’d make the book better. But for now, this is where I am.
Please picture me, muttering to myself, for the next three days.
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Pictured below, new polymer clay experiments with tile cutters; I like them a lot. Eliana, who’s been helping me with photographing these, says that she likes each new piece of jewelry better, and these are now her favorites. I showed her how to add the earring backs and jump rings to them on Wednesday, which sped up the process for me. 
I tried covering them with resin, but stopped after two – the resin tended to pool in the crevices in ways I didn’t love. So these are naked autumn tile earrings, and they like it that way.
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I did add a new opening paragraph to the book, which is a pretty radical change. Here it is:
“A young woman dressed in a crimson sari runs through the streets of the domed city, gold adorning her wrists, throat, temple. Her chest heaves with the effort, and she curses with every stumble on the cobbled streets. Passersby stop and stare – humans, humods, aliens. Even on Kriti, hub world of a dozen Jump gates, home of the University of All Worlds, this is not a common sight. But her head is down, determined, and she runs past them soon enough, running towards her future, or away from her past.”
(I am not sure of that first verb. Is she simply dressed in a crimson sari? Robed in a crimson sari? Entangled in a crimson sari….hmmm….)
