Diane Duane's 'The Big Meow'

Welcome to the glitzy, murky world of 1946 Hollywood, a smoggy film-noir landscape filled with glamourous starlets, flamboyantly corrupt studio heads, and wicked, pampered cats with hidden agendas; a city of unsolved murders, snoopy screenwriters, scheming PR flacks, and a shadowy, celebrity-ridden cult dabbling in knowledge better left alone -- knowledge which could destroy the world's present and doom its future, if the dreadful promise of the Year of the Black Jaguar is fulfilled...

(Want to read the full "back cover" blurb for The Big Meow? It's now over here.)

And welcome to the weblog for the online Big Meow novel project!

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Chapter 7 news and project update

Dear folks,

Just a quick note to let you know that things are about to move into a considerably higher gear on the "Big Meow" project.

A word first about the health situation here, since it has been interfering in a big way, and some of you will want to know how things are. My gall bladder is stable at the moment, and though surgery is going to be a necessity shortly, the doctor has let me know that I should be able to keep going as I am without too much trouble for the time being. I am therefore taking the rest of the month of July off to deal with the task of finishing the book, so that it can go off for editing. (There are other circumstances affecting this, but more about those in a moment.) I want to also apologize for not having updated everyone on this situation sooner, but it kept looking like (each few days) it would be okay, and then (again each few days) something would go wrong again. I'm very sorry about this, all -- I'll work to be better about updates.

Chapter Seven is now nearly ready (after having been reworked a couple of times) and will be posted over the next few days, ideally on Friday. Other projects are all in a "quiet period" at the moment, so I should be able to get down to the business fo completing chapters Eight through Thirteen (and there may be a fourteenth -- I have to see how the structure starts acting in the book's final stages, as some new plot material has turned up that I wasn't expecting).

The only factor likely to interfere with this is one which some of you will already know about from Peter's blog at petermorwood.livejournal.com. His mother is in the hospital with an exascerbation of her longstanding heart trouble, and at the age of ninety, you'll understand that we both feel our place right now is up there with her rather than down here at home. We will therefore be heading up for Belfast today, and I'm not entirely clear how long we may be up there (though right now the plan is to stay, on this visit, only until Saturday). This relocation may slow down my work somewhat, but with the laptop and the speech-to-text software with me, I should be able to keep going at a good pace. However, not being home means I will not have access to the mail server software from which the chapter-is-ready announcements come -- so I'd ask everybody please to check the weblogs here and at the-big-meow.com for news as to when individual chapters will be going up. As usual, subscribers will be seeing their chapters ten days before everybody else does.

Thanks again, all. Keep an eye on the blogs starting Friday.

Best -- Diane
11:56 AM | 0 comments |