An innocuous message last night from Lili:
How’s the Livi book?
Still stabbing it?
At this point it’s not so much that I’m stabbing as I’m lying in a pool of my own blood on the floor while the book looks on triumphantly.
“Writing a book is like The Bride vs The Crazy 88s/O Ren Ishii fight, except I’m stuck at the Gogo part,” I explained, which of course got me thinking of an old blog post from several years ago on my long-dead site.
So I’ve pulled it out for your perusal. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to write a book, look no further than the latter half of Kill Bill Vol I.
At first, it’s kinda fun. I start with a bang by lopping off someone’s limb.
Hear that, book? Oh, you are going DOWN, bitch.
So the book throws some minions at me. I make short work of them, still with lots of energy.
Then it gets a little tougher.
I fight and fight and think it’s going to defeat me, but I win. My training has kicked in, you see–all the hours I spent writing, rewriting, thinking, writing some more, defeating other books, being taught by Pai Mei. And I do, after all, have a Hattori Hanzo keyboard. I pick up my sword to finally slay the fucking thing.
And then something clicks in my brain–though I think I’m doing well, I hear the other plot points and characters veering off path. (Head to 4:00)
Story: “You didn’t think it was gonna be that easy, did you?”
Me: “You know, for a second there? Yeah. I kinda did.”
And then I battle the Crazy 88s only there really are eighty-eight of them and they nearly slaughter me.
Eventually I make it to the end where the fucking book trash talks me.
I’m bleeding, beaten, exhausted, but eventually show the book who’s boss. And the book apologizes, usually during the last chapter during a late-night 10K writing marathon, ready to admit defeat.
And I kill it.
That’s me, The Flower of Carnage.
Except…yeah, this fight is taking longer than usual. It must be a director’s cut or something. Livi #3 is still waiting.
Back I go, into the breach…
*
(Catch up while I kill this thing!)
West Is Best Club is getting, for starters, a West prequel novella (will be a novel by the time revisions are done, though) called Tiger’s Memory. It’s about his first solo assignment for his agency, his first girlfriend, and how things go terribly wrong for him on both counts.
Livi #3 was set aside briefly as it’s just giving me so many headaches. I had to rearrange a few scenes and try to figure out what’s been bothering me with it. I strongly suspect this is going to be one of those books that needs heavy revision, and perhaps more sets of eyes than I’m used to; I tend to get by with excellent beta-reading and copyediting, but this one’s really, really rough. I hate this book. I will finish it eventually, but in the meantime I loathe it.
Remember last time I mentioned wanting to write something involving a haunting? Well, I finally did, and it ended up being a Livi novella. Set between Odin’s Spear and Zheng’s Tomb, Ashford’s Ghost involves Livi finding something’s not quite right about the new house. Isolated out in the country during a blizzard, she, Pru, West, and Laurel set out to uncover a mysterious presence in her home and put a stop to it before they’re all burned alive.
Writer of urban fantasy, thrillers/mysteries, and horror.