But, hey! I’m here! And here’s a post! Which would be even better if I had a photo to upload, but the only couple of photos I’ve taken were with my cellphone and I didn’t bring the cable allowing me to transfer that to my netbook, so, sorry.

I may have been a failure as a blogger at Banff thus far, but certainly not as a writer.  I’ve turned out something over 25,000 words on Magebane since arriving, with a full 10,000 of that coming yesterday (today I only managed 7,500…which is still pretty darn good). I don’t think I have ever in my life written 10,000 words in one day before. If I could keep that up, I could crank out a 125,000-word novel like Magebane is supposed to be in less than two weeks! (Except my brain would explode, of course. Which would be a bummer.)

The story is flying because I finally pushed past the stalling point and everything has been brand new. It’s also true, as I Twittered, that I’ve outwritten my outline, which is bearing an increasingly small resemblance to the way the plot is actually proceeding, but that’s not too surprising and I’m confident the book that’s taking shape now is better than the book I originally outline.,

Of course, it was that original outline that actually SOLD the book, so it’ll be interesting to see what my editor thinks!

I’m here through Saturday, and should be able to get another 30,000 words out in that time, minimum. That’ll put the total word count somewhere close to 100,000 words, so I don’t think I’ll finish my first draft here…but I’ll have broken its back and should be racing for the finish when I get home.

Oh, and if you are somewhere other than Banff, where today was one of the most perfectly glorious mountain days I’ve ever experienced, I pity you.

I’m hardly in the same league as Spider, writer-wise, which makes it doubly an honour to be asked. I don’t know too many details about programming yet, except that I’ll be singing in the Friday night cabaret and I’ll be interviewed by Barb Galler-Smith at some point.

Pure Speculation runs October 2 to 4 at the Shaw Convention Centre. If you’re Edmonton, I hope you’ll consider checking it out!

The second bit of news: I’ve been accepted for a Self-Directed Writing Residency at the Banff Centre. That means that for a whole week, September 20 through 26, I’ll be holed up in the mountains doing very little else but working on Magebane, my new fantasy novel (and my first book as Lee Arthur Chane). I hope to get an enormous amount done on it while I’m there, and it rather tickles me to be working on Magebane in the same place that Marseguro was born, as a writing exercise in Robert J. Sawyer’s Writing With Style class on writing science fiction.

So the next month is shaping up to be an all-Alberta adventure. Sing along with me, “Alberta bound, Albert bound, it’s good to be Alberta bound…”

He came in alone, leaving the guards in the hallway outside, and closed the door gently behind him.

Words today: 2,138

Total thus far: 46,788

And, yes, I worked on Magebane, too. Didn’t take any new photos today, but here’s a nice sunset photo from the other day! (All of these photos I’ve been posting on my “first sentence I wrote today” posts were taken with my BlackBerry Storm, by the way…not sure if I’ve mentioned that or not.)

And then the gate to the inner city opened, and what he saw drove all other thoughts from his head.

Words today: 1,998

Total thus far: 44,650

I’m officially past the 200th page of the manuscript, if it were printed in standard manuscript format, which of course it has not been and may never be, everything being done by email these days. Anyway, it’s steaming along pretty nicely.

This afternoon I wrote in a new location, the Hotel Saskatchewan Radisson Plaza, both in the Monarch Lounge (from which I had a view of the work being done on the federal government building on the corner of Victoria Avenue and Scarth Street-Photo 1) and upstairs on the deserted convention floor (Photo 2), which  had the benefit of being very quiet. That was all Magebane rewriting work.

Tomorrow…much of the same!

The much-diminished caravan of Freefolk Clan Diannan had only been on the road for an hour the next morning when the attack came.

Words today: 2,277

Words thus far: 42,652

A good morning’s work. I’m getting close to 200 manuscript pages on this story. I think it’s going to need considerable pruning when I get to rewriting, but the plot is advancing well.

I spent the mid-day wearing my editor-of-Fine-Lifestyles-Regina hat, then turned into Lee Arthur Chane in the afternoon and worked on Magebane. I’m still (again) rewriting more than writing, but I really think I’ve got my plot demons licked this time. (Sounds like a fantasy-novel curse, actually. “Oh, go lick a demon!”) So good progress there, too.

Tonight I watched The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl (or is it the other way around?) with my daughter, then we played Barbies before bed. (Major Daddy brownie points! Score!) The movie, by the way, wasn’t half bad. I’d have adored it as a 10-year-old. My daughter liked it.

Science column tomorrow, otherwise it’ll be a rinse-and-repeat of today.

Today’s photo: a decorative lamp. Because it was there, that’s why.

Imlinn stood on the Freefolk trail leading north toward City Duodecim and studied the tracks he had found there by the light of the stars.

Words today: 2,068

Total thus far: 40,381

Good writing this morning, as a scene I hadn’t even realized I needed came to life and both told me something about a major character and helped explain a few things that needed explaining. I enjoyed it! Plus I was sitting outside on a beautifully warm morning with a cup of coffee. What’s not to love?

This afternoon I worked on Magebane, going back through it from the beginning (again) to see what I can salvage and what needs complete rewriting in view of what I really hope is the necessary plot corrections I dreamed up yesterday.

Concentration was somewhat hampered by the fact that Saskatchewan Roughrider football players, both present and past (from the 1989 Grey Cup championship team) were exchanging war stories just around the corner. Half the time I found what they were saying more interesting than what I was attempting to do. But I got some stuff done.

Today’s photo was taken with the built-in Webcam in the Samsung NC10, so that’s sort of what I looked like while I was writing, although I wasn’t always smiling like that…

In the stunned silence that followed, Amlinn stood stock-still for a long moment, then suddenly ran after her grandfather.

Words today: 1,514

Total thus far: 38,313

That was first thing this morning; in the afternoon, I did good work on Magebane, but it was, once again, of the rethinking variety. I went back into the outline and figured out some more things that have been causing me fits. Now I really think the plot is sound, instead of scatterbrained, which is how I’ve felt it be as I’ve tried to write. That’s the good thing. Bad thing: I think I’m going to have to go back to the beginning yet again and rewrite from there to make it all come together. So, no new word count today, and the word count thus far is essentially meaningless.

Sigh.

Hey, but I’ve still got 2 1/2 months to deadline…

Best thing about today: they put in much more comfy chairs outside on the deck at the Wascana Country Club, which meant I could sit outside in the shad with my netbook and write and enjoy the great outdoors at the same time. A very nice writerly thing to do. Sometimes I really like my “job.”

Amlinn gestured at her grandfather and the departing messenger. “They’re not coming.”

Words today: 1,697

Total thus far: 36,799

Made some good progress today, and what was particularly exciting about it had little to do with what I wrote, which was mostly of the people talking variety (though there’s a big action scene coming up next), but rather with what I used to write it: my new netbook computer, a Samsung NC10. I bought it with birthday money, and so far I’m very happy with it. Quite a decent keyboard–93 percent full-sized, which means I can still type on it comfortably, and it has nice full-keyboard-like raised keys with the tactile electric-typewriter sensation I crave. I do have to wonder if anybody who designs these keyboards is actually a touch typist, though, because, as with almost every keyboard, there’s an oddity: in this case, the right shift key is smaller than usual, which means you have to reach further with your right pinkie than normal to hit it. As a result, I type a lot of capital letters that first show up like this: \a, instead of A. I suppose I could just leave them and do a search and replace later, but still, a little annoying.

On the plus side, the Samsung NC10, almost alone among netbooks as far as I can tell, has a matte screen. Glossy screens are annoying for writers–at least, for this writer, and I think I’ve heard Robert J. Sawyer complain about them, too. So that was a selling point.

I’m planning to get by with just the netbook on my trip to WorldCon. All I ever do when travelling is write, surf the net and maybe store a few photos, and that’s exactly what the netbook is designed for. Why take something three times its size?

In the afternoon I worked on Magebane, but I don’t have a “first sentence” for it today because I finished up editing a chunk of old material. Now I really am ready to move ahead, although I’m still struggling with finding the right POV characters and a few other things. This is turning into a harder book to write than I’d thought, but I really want to get it right, since it’ll be “Lee Arthur Chane”‘s first novel! (He’s going to WorldCon, too, by the way.

I need to devote a good chunk of time either tomorrow or Friday (or both) to my new duties as editor of Fine Lifestyles Regina, but I’m determined to keep both books moving ahead at least a little. I’ll keep you posted…as always.

“Follow the Freefolk,” Morran had told Illinen, and since the Freefolk moved every day, that meant he had to leave the Warren the very next night.

Words yesterday: 1,886

Total thus far: 35,102

People kept asking me what I did for my birthday. Well, I wrote, of course, what else? A nice chunk of Blue Fire in the morning, then in the afternoon I worked on Magebane: I’m back rewriting a chunk of stuff I did before, though, so no new sentence to report there. (Although I did write new sentences, but they were interspersed with old stuff so, by my own admittedly inconsistent and made-up-on-the-spot rules for this little blog feature, they do not count.)

But when he glanced over his shoulder, the light reflected in diamond points from the tossing wavelets, until it ended in utter blackness where the shore met the water.

Words Saturday: 1,238

Total thus far: 34,876

I was writing on the deck of the Temple Gardens Mineral Spa in Moose Jaw, watching people (my wife and daughter among them) soaking in the hot mineral water of the outdoor portion of the pool. As the only fully dressed person, fully dry person in sight and the only one typing on a glowing screen in the gathering dusk, I was probably fairly conspicuous. On the other hand, I was a writer writing during the Festival of Words, a major Moose Javian event. The hotel should have paid me just for sitting there and providing an authorial ambiance!