Writing Post Not On Wednesday Again: Finished, Sort Of

So this time I didn't write about writing on Wednesday because I didn't have much to report. I had a rather unproductive week, I'm afraid. But since then I've finished the longhand draft of "Brother Thomas's Angel."

Incidentally, I don't really recommend writing longhand. Some writers, like Neil Gaiman, for example, write a longhand draft first and then do initial edits as they transcribe that draft to a word-processed one. That's what I always used to do. Until I had to write some stuff under deadline and simply didn't have time to do it twice. And I discovered that I don't write any differently when I compose on the computer. But besides simply writing speed, there's also physical health to think of. I essentially have permanent tendonitis in my right wrist from many, many years of madly scribbling longhand. I've been writing since I could hold a pencil and make the shapes of letters, and it's hard on the bod. My wrist has a noticeable bulge on the top where the tendonitis has formed a ganglion. I could have surgery, but it doesn't bother me much most of the time. When I refrain from doing everything longhand. Typing has its own problems, of course, but they're generally not as bad, and are more easily preventable.

But anyway. A draft of my latest story is done and I'm working on transcribing it. I'm not really sure how long it is, but I'm almost at 2000 words, and I still have a long way to go. It may be a novella.

On the print front, I submitted a few stories to magazines recently and got a couple rejections back (not unexpected ones). I'm still waiting to hear back about two stories.

And in ebooks, I haven't put anything else up yet, but I'm working on covers for a trio of short stories based on the Sleeping Beauty fairytale and for part one of Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective (the serial novel based on my in-limbo comic The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring). The individual parts of Aeryn will probably get simple typographic covers and then when the whole novel goes up it'll have a more elaborate cover and will also be available in print from White Raven Press. And it'll be under a pseudonym. Not because I am trying to hide authorship, but because of the way it fits into a larger body of ongoing work that includes printmaking, metalwork, bookbinding and whatever else.

And I think that's it for fiction. For non-fiction, you can read my latest article for Mania, "Laputa, Atlantis and Floating Islands: Ancestors of Ghibli's Castle in the Sky," here.