{"id":194,"date":"2008-11-08T13:33:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-08T21:33:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=194"},"modified":"2008-11-08T13:33:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-08T21:33:00","slug":"so-if-im-done-why-do-i-still-have-this-queasy-lump-in-my-stomach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=194","title":{"rendered":"So if I’m done, why do I still have this queasy lump in my stomach?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two weeks of edits. Two weeks of no exercise, skipped meals, late nights, and cats who either don’t understand that a 3:00 a.m. feeding should allow them to wait a little past their usual 8:00 a.m. breakfast slot while their exhausted can opener tries to sleep in a bit, or who simply reject that premise on general principles. Merciless hungry claws hooked through my internasal septum at 8:05 because a novel outline that was supposed to be done in fucking August<\/i> was still making my agent go huh? <\/i>and By the time they get back to earth I have no idea what’s going on<\/i> in October.<\/p>\n

What we got here is a Blindsight<\/i> spinoff; a thought-experiment on the nature and evolution of Singularities, past and future; a cast of characters who don’t understand their own actions (one of the themes of the book is that it’s neurologically impossible to understand our own true motives; the best we can do is make guesses after the fact); all told through the eyes of a man whose brain is literally being rewired throughout the course of the story. Oh, and we also got a subversive Biblical allegory in which angels, Christ figures, Tempters, and God all have hard-sf underpinnings, and in which the only route to salvation is to lose<\/i> your soul. If you’re not at least a little confused by then end, I’m not doing my job right.<\/p>\n

Still, I can sympathize. Agents the world over would probably quail at selling any book which asserts that the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey was too obvious.<\/p>\n

But I think I’m done. I’ve tried to cover all bases: three opening chapters; a two-page Coles-Notes bullet list on Why The Singularity May Not Work As Advertised; three separate outline\/pitches\/teasers ranging from 400 words to over 7,000. (And let us take a moment here to acknowledge the beta-reading skilz of Dave Nickle and Madeline Ashby<\/a>, the latter of whom literally rewrote my 10K outline in less than 3K — by, in her words, turning Solaris<\/i> into Transformers<\/i>. I had to fatten it up again a bit to hide the decepticons, but watch this woman: notwithstanding the whole Goat’s-Head-Soup motif on her blog, she will go far.)<\/p>\n

I don’t know if it works now. I don’t know if my agent will like it; I don’t know if he can even get it out there before the whole fucking publishing industry packs it in for their annual two-month Christmas vacation, or if anyone in today’s economic climate would buy a book that tells them how much worse everything is going to get. But there’s nothing much I can do about that now, and I have other duties piling up that will more reliably pay the bills.<\/p>\n

First things first, though. I’ve just completed my first 16K run in two weeks or more. I am about to take my first shower in almost that long. Now I am going to gorge on cr\u00e8me pumpkins and reread Watchmen, and tomorrow I will be attending a Swedish vampire movie of unknown pedigree. I am going to take this weekend off<\/i>.<\/p>\n

If I’m feeling especially decadent, I may even change the fetid litter box of my deranged and hostile cats.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two weeks of edits. Two weeks of no exercise, skipped meals, late nights, and cats who either don’t understand that a 3:00 a.m. feeding should allow them to wait a little past their usual 8:00 a.m. breakfast slot while their exhausted can opener tries to sleep in a bit, or who simply reject that premise […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}