No sleep till 50!!

So, it turns out I can kinda work hard when I make myself. Tomorrow night I've got to turn in the first 50 pages of my book for the workshop I'm going to in May, and I'd been kinda hating everything I'd written for the book so far. This weekend, I decided that I absolutely could not bear to submit what I had. I mean, taking flawed work to a workshop is good, that's what workshops are for, if things go the way they're supposed to, you get help with the flaws and they start to flake away like dried guano. But sometimes the work just sucks, you know? The flaw with the story or chapters of a novel is that they simply suck in an all-encompassing ball of suckitude, and when things are that bad, I don't know that it's worth workshopping.

So, I gave myself the last two nights to rewrite the first 50 pages and hopefully get this book back on track. It was pretty tough today in particular, because I woke up at 5:00 AM with a migraine, struggled to make it through the Day Job, and when I sat down at the keyboard tonight, I wasn't really ready to give it that arithmatically improbable 110%. But I toughed it out, tough guy that I am, and fought through it, fighter that I am, and I made it to page 50, and a big bunch of it was entirely new stuff, and I'm sorry, but I just rock, is all.

Tomorrow morning and evening I'll do a quick clean-up, try not to despair at what will almost certainly be another round of "I suck, I can't write, I should take up neurosurgery," and send it off to my fellow workshoppers.

And then it's on to the next 50 pages. And the 50 after that. And the 50 after that ...

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Tangent Online reviews the April/May 2006 Asimov's, and Kathy Sedia has some kind words for my story, "The Osteomancer's Son". Woo!