http://www.billblais.com/blog the literary tribulations of bill blais Thu, 07 Aug 2008 01:22:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en and that's okay. at least, that's what i have to tell myself right now. i was cruising along and taking names, as previously discussed, right through monday. it felt awesome. tuesday - pffzzt. today - pfiffle. to be fair, i wrote probably 3 pages on tuesday. to be honest, every one of them was crap. ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/08/06/new-lesson-sometimes-i-hit-a-wall/ following, sort of, on the thread of a comment from my previous post, i started yesterday with typing up my previous day's posts (and for the record, i did manage to get the 5 pages done on wednesday to make up for tuesday's moving trip, so that was cool). this was ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/08/01/yesterdays-lesson-first-things-first/ i haven't been doing daily updates on the progress meter, and i only just caught up on typing in the work from last week. so as of sunday, i had typed 15,241 words, which is almost 20% of my goal! broken down in other increments, i wrote 36 hand-written pages, meaning ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/07/29/quick-progress/ first, and rather sublimely cool, David Anthony Durham linked to my blog, among several others, in reference to summaries of readercon. as i mentioned, i heard him on the panel, but i unfortunately missed the opportunity to hear him read from his forthcoming novel, the second in his Acacia series. ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/07/24/back-in-the-saddle/ so i attended readercon down in burlington, ma, this past weekend. this was my first convention and a very good experience. as i understand it, from the literature and other comments in the con and online, readercon is a more literary-focused than many cons. it has a clear sf/f angle, ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/07/21/readercon/ sometimes, that's what i feel like. and distinctly NOT producing good material. it's usually in the days when i'm not feeling the creative vibe, obviously (and of which there have been far too many recently), but there are still some days where i'm feeling pretty good about things, progress appears to ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/07/15/just-a-monkey-at-a-type-writer/ i sent a hardcover copy of Witness to the amazon.com "search inside!" folks back in April, for them to scan and put into the system, and the listing has now been updated and the text is visible. The first couple chapters, anyway, plus the 'Surprise Me' functionality. so what? well, i ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/07/09/amazoncom-search-inside-feature-enabled/ short version: Witness is back in the Ingram Books In Print database! long version: no-one at iUniverse made me aware of this. i got tired of waiting and pestered my borders contact and asked him to see if it had been fixed. he checked, it was, and the discount was even ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/07/03/i-just-want-a-response-is-that-so-wrong/ okay, i've been mostly complaining lately, so here's something different. near the end of april, i sent a copy of Witness to an online fantasy/sf book review blog who said they'd be interested in giving it a go, but apparently the package never arrived. i got distracted in the intervening time, ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/07/02/how-cool-is-that/ [this is really just a leftover moan from last week, but for purposes of full disclosure of the *ahem* joys of this unemployed writing life, and to emphasize the recent issues with iUniverse, i am posting it] it's depressing to see that the last of these self-promotion posts was made on ... http://www.billblais.com/blog/2008/06/30/flagrant-self-promotion-update-6-aka-rule-3-call-ahead-first/