Once More, Into the Breach!

The title I stuck on this blog refers to war. It’s from a poem, or story, or something. Anyway, I feel a little like I’m at war. At war with all the stuff in my office.

See, we’re moving. Which means we need to sell the house. Which means I need to clean up my office which is packed to the rafters with totebags and magazines and books, both read and to-be-read. I am currently in the middle of revising New Blood, trying to cut 643 pages down to the vicinity of 500 or so…not doing too badly, but probably not doing quite well enough at that. And I need to proof a few things on the ARC of The Eternal Rose. And the grandboys are coming to visit on Sunday, so next week will be impossible to work. Well, until their daddy comes for a few days.

Anyway, I need to go tape a box together and stick some stuff in it. (Totebags probably.) And I don’t want to. (whine, whine) My neck is sore (from bending over those revisions, probably) and I’m tired and I’m lazy and whiney and–well, you’ve probably given up on me.

Still, the story is verra cool… I was trying to pitch it to a romance editor a while back, and my pitch was totally amorphous and awful–and I realized it really fits the epic fantasy structure better than it fits the romance novel structure. It IS a romance–the romance plot is the last one resolved–but resolving the romance also resolves the fantasy conflict… And it has a fantasy structure. Heroine learns she has magic talent and meets the hero who acts as a mentor. They defeat early bad guys and go on a quest for learning, and encounter a new, more evil bad guy. They escape him, keep going on quest, while new bad guy chases them. They think they reach safety, discover there’s an even greater evil which they team up with allies to defeat–but the evil bad guy brings the first bad guy to cause new trouble and… Well, in the end, love conquers all. Literally. Sort of. Still, it’s more a fantasy structure than a romance structure. We will see how it does.

I’d better go tape up that box…