Some writing, some reading/listening
Took a break from magazine stuff to wander over to the East Bay for a writing-in-a-café afternoon.
Wrote 1600+ words on the story-in-progress that I haven't touched in months, and did some necessary note-checking and detail-working-out and character-enhancing that took time and didn't result in words added to story but will improve the story in the long run. Sadly, the story's now at around 8k words and is less than halfway done; I don't see a way to avoid it being a novella. Also sadly, much of what I've written so far has major first-draft problems; after I finish this draft, I'll need to restructure the beginning and rewrite a lot of the rest of what I've written so far. (Omniscient POV is making the story flat and making various minor things much too complicated; I think I need to switch to rotating individual third-person POVs (which in today's scenes added significant depth and texture to the characters and the writing), but that's gonna take a lot of rewriting.)
Anyway, good progress, but a little daunting to look at how much is left to do, considering how rarely I work on it.
On the drive home, I plugged my iPhone into the car stereo and ended up listening to the Escape Pod version of Tim Pratt's story "Artifice and Intelligence," which we published at SH a couple of years ago, and I was charmed all over again. A fun and entertaining story. And on a minor technical side note, I loved what the Escape Pod people did with the voice of the AI.
(I so rarely have time to listen to a spoken-word recording that I've heard very few episodes of Escape Pod, and haven't even listened to all of the SH podcasts.)
Okay, back to reading submissions for me.