Following Mary Robinette Kowal‘s ever elegant and clever example, this space will be my drafting table–I will post chapters of my current work in progress for you to read and comment upon. This is, of course, password-protected, since anything I post here will be under contract or dreaming of growing up to have a contract of its own someday, and thus all copyrights and publication provisos apply. (Thus, I cannot make these posts appear on your Kindle.) However, all you have to do to get the password is ask, by filling out the form below. The work in progress is a rough draft and may or may not resemble the final published book in any way.
A gentle-but-insistent note: this is not meant to be simply a super-cool way for you to read my new books before they are published. It is meant to be a part of my writing process, and one which I hope will become a permanent fixture. In exchange for access of this kind, for basically seeing my books naked before they’re gussied up for the ball, what I’d like from you is feedback. Comments, what you liked, what you didn’t (please don’t tell me about my typos), speculation about where you think the plot is going, references that confused you or delighted you, all of that sort of thing. If a lot of passwords go out and no one is interacting with the chapters I will call it a failed experiment and go back to my lonely ways. I don’t mean this to sound harsh, or like a taskmistress, but my playground, my rules, and this is a bit of a social contract in my admittedly nearsighted view.
Now that’s out of the way: OMG this could be so much fun. Writing is often a terribly lonely enterprise, and it is my fond hope that this will make it less so, that we can all learn together (every writer, no matter how advanced, has things to learn). I have spent most of my writing life on the internet, and it excites me deeply to be able to in some sense go back to my roots, that fabled world of 1999, when I was just posting fiction on the wide open web, and listening to the very first whispers of folk who read it.
The first book here attempted will be, appropriately, the sequel to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The writer cannot hear the reader;
Chapters fall apart; the structure cannot hold;
Mere postmodernism is loosed upon the world,
The deadline-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of the literary life is drowned;
The industry lacks all conviction, while the authors
Are full of passionate intensity. Surely so
the last line is at hand;
Surely publication is at hand.
Publication! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with hardback body and a head of many pages,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert critics.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty months of weary work were vexed to print by this rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Manhattan to be born?
–Yeats and me
