Freeeeeeeedommmmmmmm!

BRACE!!!

Ahem. That is to say, I have achieved Early Release from the boot (the four weeks will be up on Friday), and am now back to the ankle brace I was wearing prior to surgery.

Man, I had really grown to hate this thing in March. Now? It's my bestest friend. Because it isn't the boot.

I'm sitting here in my jeans -- jeans!!! I haven't worn these things for almost a month!!! -- and I could put on a second shoe if I really wanted to, and I could also drive, or walk to the bank to deposit checks, though I'm not going to do that because it would be really easy to overdo this. I've already discovered that we'll still be going down stairs the two-feet-on-one-step method for a while; trying to walk down them normally produced a twinge that said clearly, you're not ready for this yet. Okay. Fair enough. Heck, I still feel off-kilter after (nearly) four weeks of having my right foot be higher than my left. Standing flat feels like my left leg is now longer than my right.

Physical therapy starts Thursday. I am very much looking forward to it.

Advice from the pro side

Keep notes.

Keep notes from the start. Write down what the characters look like, and where things are. If you invent a town or something along those lines, make a map, even if it's just chicken scratches on the back of an envelope.

By taking such steps, you will save yourself the effort of having to reconstruct these things by scrounging for details in the three novels, one novelette, and one novella you have already completed. And when the thing you're trying to map is a faerie palace which (you have abundantly established) doesn't correspond in a logical fashion to the city above it, you will be very grateful that you have saved yourself this tedious and problematic work.

If you fail to keep notes, you will use up all your scratch paper trying to find a way to make it all fit together, so you can then decide where and how to break it for the purposes of the fourth book. So be smart from the start.

In other words, don't be like me.

10K!

Thanks to April's "500 a day" rule, missing several days has not prevented me from arriving at the 10K milestone on schedule.

For the record, the title hunt is still on. If you've sent me e-mail and not gotten a reply yet, I promise to take care of that soon. In the meanwhile, keep on suggesting; I appreciate all the help.


Word count: 10,025
LBR quota: It's the River Fleet. I think it counts as blood.
Authorial sadism: Leaving Dead Rick standing knee-deep in the aforesaid Fleet, wondering whether he's going to run into a tosher or Blacktooth Meg first.

Victorian Book Report: Strange and Secret Peoples, by Carole G. Silver

I first read this book just because I owned it. Then I re-read it three years ago, when I thought the Victorian book would be the next one I wrote in the Onyx Court series, before detouring through In Ashes Lie and A Star Shall Fall. Now I'm re-reading bits and pieces of it for reference, because this, ladies and gents, is the nineteenth-century answer to Katherine Briggs' Pale Hecate's Team. Briggs was analyzing fairy folkore and its literary expression in Shakespeare's day; Silver is doing the same for the Victorians.

She breaks it down thematically: the origins of fairies, changelings and abductions, fairy brides, "racial myths and mythic races," fairy cruelty, and flitting, the departure of fairies for their own lands (or sometimes Australia). Furthermore, she questions what these things meant to the Victorians, why these kinds of stories became popular; in the case of changelings, for example, she talks about disease (both physical and mental), and about social response to deviant behavior, and about the class-based and racial tensions within Victorian society, that strongly affected the way these stories were told and received, and who was doing the telling and receiving.

In other words, pretty much everything you'd want to write a Victorian fairy novel.

If I have one complaint, it's that I want this book to be bigger. Only 234 pages, counting the endnotes; I'm sure there's more to be said here, and I wish Silver had said it.