January’s been a bit of a break from my usual routine. Overall I’ve done less writing, as I’ve been working my way through a list of more mundane tasks, many of them DIY related, a lot of them involving paint, which I now have speckled in various hard to reach places about my house and person. What writing I have done has been bitty: editing PoA, starting preliminary work on ‘Echoes of Paradise’, revising old stories (including one requested re-write which has since sold) and getting a couple of new stories down as rough first drafts.
I’ve still got half a short story to finish, and a tiny bit more house-painting to do, but in the next week I hope to start the re-writes on ‘Consorts of Heaven’. Last night I had the final section critiqued by the Tripod writing group. They pointed out scenes which (as I suspected) I had rather dashed off, and needed to revisit slowly and carefully in the rewrite. We also discussed a maths-related plot point, which I’ll need to think about – one of the group is a professional mathmetician, usefully enough.
With pleasing timing I got back from the crit group meeting to find that I’d got another crit, this time from Vaughan Stanger, who writes harder SF than I and is, technically, a rocket scientist. He read the whole thing in a few weeks (rather than reading it in sections as Tripod did) and has given me a characteristically honest and brutal crit. Much food for thought there. My next task is to read through all the notes I have, my own and those from critiquers, get them into some sort of order, and think about how to address them.
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