Various post-weekend updates.

(For purposes of this post, 'post-weekend' means 'Thursday night to now.')

Well, things continue to be hectic around here, which is exactly how I like them, so I really can't complain. Since Thursday, I have...

* Finished the initial revisions on Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues. This was draft one-and-a-half, to let me fix all the continuity glitches and authorial stupid that had managed to creep in around the edges; now I'm ready to kick off draft two, during which I'll lose 10% of my hard-earned word count and hit all my characters repeatedly with a hammer. Because that's social. I'm feeling super-good about this book, and I love, love, love the fact that it's finally, blessedly finished.

* Purchased tickets to head for Seattle for my first pre-Conflikt rehearsal. Conflikt is the Pacific Northwest's own filk convention, and I'm going to be their Guest of Honor in 2009 (it's a January convention). I'm super-excited, but I'm also super-nervous. Rehearsal will make the nervousness become less while the excitement becomes more. It's a match made in heaven. Plus I get to hang out with all my awesome Seattle area friends, and that never fails to make me happy.

* Processed a bucketload of edits on Late Eclipses of the Sun, aka, 'Toby Daye book four,' aka, 'Seanan, if you just sold the first three, what the hell is wrong with you that you're working on the fourth one already?!' OCD cat is working marginally ahead of the curve, yo. OCD cat is also endlessly amazed by the editing process, because, well...I'm a pretty good author. I think I can say that without bragging, since, y'know, sold the trilogy and all. But give me a bunch of good proofreaders with machetes, and things become amazing. I'm watching this book just get better and better, and it's incredible.

* Finished the third chapter of The Mourning Edition, bringing me one step closer to world domination through zombies. I like world domination through zombies. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

* Entered about ten pages of data into my Toby Continuity Wiki, where it gleams in hyperlinked, clickable glory, thrilling my OCD heart to no end. It's gorgeous. I'm trying not to think about the part where it's the beginning of several hundred cumulative hours of work, because it really is going to make my life infinitely easier, and just dwell on the part where it's gorgeous.

* Started Discount Armageddon, book one of the Price series. Because I know you're gonna say it anyway, say it with me now: CHEESE! AND! CAKE! Also, ballroom dancing, snarky chameleon girls in fancy hotels, apartments sublet from Yeti, and La Parkour. It's good at be this kind of crazy.

My weekend was awesome. How was yours?

Contemplating continuity.

So I'm in the process of translating the Big Book of Faerie -- my several-hundred-page continuity guide for the Toby Daye series -- into the wonderful Wiki that Chris set up for me. This is naturally a slow and somewhat painful process, made more slow and painful by the fact that the document got way, way too big for Microsoft Word about, oh, a hundred pages ago, and is thus full of broken bookmarks and dysfunctional hyperlinks.

I've created templates and blank pages to use as guides for the various types of page -- this is what a character needs, this is what a place needs, this is what a fae race needs. And this is forcing me to really face the fact that despite having a continuity guide the length of a novel, there's a lot of stuff that simply has never been written down.

Talk about a way to make me start twitching.

It's natural that the continuity guide would be slightly out of date: I have, after all, finished and submitted two full-length manuscripts since January, with a third currently under review prior to submission. I'm in the process of writing and editing the fourth book, and yeah, the fifth is absolutely sitting in the queue waiting for me to attack it. (I'm planning to direct all this attention squarely on Rosemary and Rue when I start having things like 'a release date,' but as I am secretly an atomic-powered robot from the future, I have a lot of energy to spare just now.) It's just...

I think part of me always thought that when I wasn't looking, all the upcoming plot twists and complications and that little subplot I'm planning in book seven and and and all just...appeared in the continuity guide. They were written down somewhere. I could get hit by a bus, and one of my friends could finish the series.

Clearly, this is not the case. And just as clearly, I've got a lot of continuity to do.