It's beginning to look a lot like...

Well, here we are, December. It’s finally looking like it here in my part of California, with rain coming down outside as I write this. Up until now it’s been mostly sunny and the temperature has been in the 60s-70s. It’s hard to get into the holiday feeling when the weather is warm.

Last night, however, I was a bit less sanguine, as thunder shook my house and woke me up from the first sound sleep I’d had in weeks. C’est la vie, I guess.

Since I last checked in back in (checks notes) … uh… wow, really? Okay… July, not much has really changed. I’m still plugging away on what I’m currently calling Doors of a Fallen Empire. I had to throw out something like 14,000 words and start over, because I’d royally borked the beginning and it read like bad fanfic. But it’s looking better now. Only 86,000 words to go for a decent novel.

As I’ve said before, this is a standalone with series potential. Just in case, I’ve roughly sketched out about five books’ worth of story. It’s a Science Fiction story that looks like Epic Fantasy in the beginning, and then opens up as the series goes on. It’s fantasy in the same way that, say, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books are fantasy—all the fantastic elements are rooted in science fiction elements, from nanotechnology to Einstein-Rosen Bridges. We’ll see how it works out.

I’ve also been noodling on another Tajen book. The story of the Zhen Empire and humanity is over, but as readers know, I left an opening for a story about Tajen, Katherine, and Liam seeking out more lost colonies of Earth. I hadn’t actually planned on writing that—it was more of a “this seems like what they would do, and maybe some readers will have fun thinking about or fan-ficcing it”—but a story has begun taking shape in my brain, and so I’m considering it.

I’ve decided that I have too many notebooks with notes scribbled on a few pages and then abandoned, so I’m thinking I’m going to “upgrade” to a Kindle Scribe soon and start using that for my note-taking and story-noodling. I compose entirely on a computer, but I often spend a lot of time writing ideas/notes/plans by hand until I’ve got a story solidly figured out, and then I start composing. I’m trying to do at least 500 words per day, but lately Meatspace concerns have meant I’ve done much less, but things seem to be getting easier. I have two weeks off beginning at the end of this week, and hopefully I can use that time well.

In non-writing news, I did well in my first semester of American Sign Language, and I’m continuing on to the next semester this spring. It’s a fun language, and more useful to my career than the others I’ve studied or am studying (past: Japanese/日本語 and Chinese(Mandarin)/中文; current: ASL, Scottish Gaelic/Gàidhlig).

One of the more interesting bits about ASL is that the grammar is very different than English, and it already drives me nuts when people say things like “It’s not grammatically correct” because you don’t sign “I have 2 brothers,” but “Me have brother two.” Since ASL is an entirely different language and not a secret code for English, it is in fact grammatically correct to sign “Me have car black,” and people who consider it a dialect and not a language need to stop.*

I hope you all have a good holiday season, and I look forward to having more fiction for you in the New Year.

*I remind anyone fluent in ASL I’m a beginning, and will welcome correction if it’s necessary.