One Day In April

I had originally planned to express my support for the "Blog Every Day in April" effort by not providing any distractions. I launched a parallel "Blog No Days in April" effort, but then realized that if I took a whole month off, then it would look... a lot like all the other months around here.

Not much new in the Christopher department. A writer-cam would tell you that I'm sometimes still in my pajamas at 9:30 am, and that for most of the day I'm sitting with my iBook on my lap and feet propped up on my desk. "Look, he typed something! Well, maybe--that could have just been him command-tabbing back and forth between Scrivener and his dictionary utility. No, now he's typing, definitely--and now he's deleted it. Tea! He just took a sip of tea! What's he staring at on the ceiling I wonder?"

The things I'm slooowly typing are my novel draft for Wizards of the Coast, more new words on my other novel, Sarah Across America (I'm taking the first four or five chapters to Rio Hondo, a workshop in Taos, at the end of next month--the e-mail said maximum 17K words, but I don't know if I'll drop that big a brick on my colleagues or not), and a novella or novellini or something called "The Tangled Girl" that's sort of tangentially related to Sarah (or will be), except instead 1930s Brit-Empire-Never-Ended America with megafauna and weird magic it's sort of timeless southeastern America as secondary fantasy world with folklore cryptids as the monsters and half-baked pre-industrial socialism instead of half-baked pre-industrial feudalism for the politics. That's for Sycamore Hill, a workshop in North Carolina in June.

Just turned in a short story to Wizards for an upcoming Forgotten Realms anthology. And I suppose I'm technically "writing" our new D&D campaign, in which Gwenda plays a purple quasi-immortal shaman who is quite literally a deva. That's called "The Sixth Company."

And we have a faboo new dog trainer lady. It took her ten minutes to calm Puck's fears with good sense and a good heart--now we try to imitate her efforts. Which I should go do right now, actually. It's sunny, and the dogs know it.

Bonus links:

• Via LCRW, a haunting Antonia Byatt poem at the New Yorker, Trench Names
• Interesting discussion about food in science fiction at Gwenda's blog
• I like quotations! Toby Buckell provides some, and other folks provide more in the comments
• And some sad news, following on the passing of Gary Gygax last year, Dave Arneson, the co-inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away

Comments

[Gwenda]

Outline, mister! And don't be divulging my purple secrets!

[Eric Francis]

Yep, sadness on the gaming geek front. I haven't played with any regularity in a decade, and even with any irregularity for years (no potty jokes, please!), and I miss it. Wish I could join y'all's campaign!

On the bright side, I actually did a second draft of my short story "Artisprudence" -- just five years or so after the first! Woo-hoo, progress!

Eric