The latest #Buffyrewatch on @tordotcom is Earshot…

Yes, ,u blogging has fallen off again. There are about three things going on in my personal life that are pretty much all-consuming–which means sometimes I’m running 300% as fast as I should and the rest I’m flatline and drooling in front of Olympic Show Jumping. I hope to tell you about some of them soon. (I am at 67,000 words on the current novel, which is nice.)

In the meantime, though, life in Sunnydale marches grimly towards Graduation:

I can heeear you!

Enjoy!

Buffy Rewatch, Write-A-Thon, And Everything

I’m a bit squeezed at the moment, which is why no writing essay yesterday. But here is a link to the latest Buffy rewatch, on Dopplegangland. Go join the fray!

For those of you still considering whether to enter the Stormwrack Name-An-Island contest, which is my giveaway for the Clarion West Write-a-thon, you can walk away with the naming rights to an island nation for a cool $35. Here’s a snippet about Isle of Gold.

“Here we go,” she said. “Isle of Gold.”
“What’s it say?” Bram asked. He had picked up her videocamera and was using it to shoot all the opened books he’d set out.
She read: “Isle of Gold is one of five nations formerly known as the Piracy–”
“Of course. They would have pirates here.”
“A barren rock unfit for agriculture and without much of a fishery, its difficult-to-navigate coastal waters and dense military fortifications led to its becoming the treasury of a shifting alliance of thieves, smugglers and raiders during the decades of warfare that plagued the seas… okay, from the looks of it, a bunch of countries put together a fleet–”
“The Fleet, presumably.”

Latest Clarion West Write-a-Thon word counts (Sponsor me here! Win intangible things!):

July 24 1,150 for a total of 54,054
July 23 1,260 for a total of 52,904
July 22 411 for a total of 51,644
July 21 899 for a total of 51,233
July 20 777 for a total of 50,324
July 19 898 for a total of 49,547
July 18 1,192 for a total of 48,649

Full disclosure: I am about two thirds of the way through the book… I’ll hit 60,000 words before the Write-a-Thon is over, but I won’t have it quite drafted. I’m still pleased with how it’s gone, and planning to hold the same pace until I’ve got the draft done.

New Squid Story, My Favorite Bit, and a Buffy rewatch!

Today my story “The Sweet Spot” is live at Lightspeed Magazine. I hope you enjoy it, and the rest of the issue, too.

I am also the featured My Favorite Bit author at Mary Robinette Kowal‘s blog today. What does that mean? Basically, it means I talk a little about my love for the much-beleaguered Juanita Corazon of Blue Magic.

The Buffy rewatch this week covers “Bad Girls” and “Consequences.” It’s called: Want. Take. Have. Pay. Pay. Pay.

New Words, #Writeathon Words, and a #Buffyrewatch

Over at Tor, I’m up to rewatching “The Zeppo.” How fun is that?

Meanwhile, a recent peek at the Clarion West Write-a-Thon notes (Sponsor me here! Win intangible things!) reveals the following metrics:

July 9th 1,092 words, for a total of 36,155
July 8th 1,017 words
July 7th 1,415 words
July 6th 1,400 words
July 5th 1,147 words

Here’s a snapshot of an island nation you can’t name on Stormwrack, a little place by the name of Tallon:

Home. Royl could make out the drydocks, the riggers, the sailmaker’s quarter. Standing well back from the water was an ugly brick plug of a building where the spellscribes worked, enchanting unbreakable masts, wheels that could hold a course, for a time, without a navigator and figureheads that called out in the fog or the dark, whenever a vessel came within sight of their carved, painted eyes.

The Yards were the one great sight of his birth island, a long stretch of busy industry as far as the eye could see, men and women assembling the bones of cutters like the one he’d been sailing these past thirty years. The ships of the Tall were famous. Many a great ship of the Fleet–Constitution, the seat of the government, came from the Yards, and so did the fastest ship on the Nine Seas, Courser. The poor doomed frigate Gulietta was a Tall’s ship, as was the craft that sank her, the stolen pirateer Bleedlove.

This comes from one of The Gales, a wip currently called “Losing Heart among the Tall.”