Writing, editing, editing writing....

And site work. There's always something going on.

I'm editing one of my favorite later novels, Glory. This is a post-apocalyptic near future fantasy novel that combines Cherokee and Egyptian mythology. I can't even tell you where this story came from, but there it is, and it reads well, is exciting -- I think it has a chance out there in the wild world of submissions.

Sometimes I know exactly where an idea comes from. Vita's Vengeance came directly after reading an eight volume history of World War I. Serendipity Blues came from talking about the 70's with my husband.

Glory just came out of nowhere. Maybe I had been reading about Egypt and the idea planted itself in my brain. Or I wanted to write an urban/contemporary fantasy novel, and the Egyptian part just fit in. I know the Cherokee mythology worked in after the initial ideas and has to do with the location of the story.

I'm about 80 pages into the editing, doing just 5 pages a day, but I get the feeling that it is going to pick up soon. I'm finding myself drawn back into the tale, and I want to get more done, follow it through to the end, tweaking and changing things along the way.

I have Legend Makers: Kinship to work on as well. It's a light weight story, the original probably 20 years old at least. I'm taking the basics and retelling the tale again, and that's been fun, though not as distracting as I hoped it would be. I need something to just distract me from other things and drag me in to write for a while. This looked like the one, so I suspect it's me and not it. The weekend was supposed to be my writing time, and do nothing else. This weekend I've done less writing than I do during the week, and spent far too much time working on other things.

But here -- rather than Serendipity Blues today, I'll give you a bit of Glory:


The car, though an older rental unit, looked clean but rather small for someone in the 5'9" range. She pushed her case into the back and slid in. The gauge showed a full charge on the power pack. Her ID and a palm scan unlocked the controls. In a moment Glory pulled away from the curb and negotiated her way past the buses.

Her mind screamed to turn around and go back -- to get away from here as fast as she could. Pride, stubbornness and probably a good dose of stupidity kept her going.

The road from the shuttle port curved between old hangers and an abandoned brick terminal, too large for the little bit of traffic passing through these days. Another turn of the road and she headed down a straightaway lined on both sides by the rusting behemoth hulks of passenger jets that would never fly again. They stood like giant prehistoric birds brought from the past, their wings unfurled and ready for the magic to return...