Progress update, June week 1

So yeah, I figure it’s time for another post about how I’m doing with my writing goals lately:

• The rewrite of ‘Harry and Mars’ is going pretty well – I’ve got up to about three thousand words, starting from scratch, and it’s addressing a lot of the issues from the last critiques I got. On the other hand, I’ve only got 1 more week to polish up both stories and send them in to my Kansas peeps.
• Preparations for going to Kansas are also doing well – I’ve gotten a lot of the logistical arrangements made, including shipping off a box of linens so that I don’t need to pack them into a suitcase to take on the plane, and I’ve started to get to know the other students on the class forum.
• I’m a little behind on the draft of “Won’t somebody think of the Children?” for the free Createspace proof – I’ve got one chapter done out of six, and I have that annoying feeling that I wasn’t paying 100% attention for the last few pages. Well, I’ll be able to get something sent off I’m sure, and if it’s not perfect then it’s not.
• I’m back on the Nanopubye forum and getting to know some of the regulars there.
• Posted a few more entries into my fanfic tracker, and realized that I really need to be working on that from the desktop tower, because that’s where all of my old fanfic chapters are stored, not necessarily on the laptops.
• About half a chapter written for my Roswell/Pern crossover.
• And I’ve been doing a LOT of blogosphere work lately, first making the rounds to try to get some votes on my next in-depth review series, (Prisoner of Azkaban still in the lead by two votes!) and visiting everybody who participated in the Fun and Games blogfest. I’m sorry that I couldn’t comment on everybody’s, but if you were on that linky list, I did come and take a look!

So that’s what I’ve been up to. How about you?

A Wizard of Mars, Chapter Fifteen

A Wizard of Mars chapter index.

So, I’m drawing close to the end of my chapter-by-chapter recap of Diane Duane’s novel “A Wizard of Mars”, and I’d like to say that I’ve had a great time sharing this book with you. I’d like to try something else soon, possibly not chapter by chapter, but going through a book in installments as I read it, instead of a single review/book report of the novel as a whole, and I’m setting up a poll to see what possible titles there’s any interest in from my regulars.

So, at the end of the last chapter, Nita teleports into the throne room of one of the Martian royal houses, that of the Shamaska city, and she’s very pissed off and wizardly and competent and magnificent, as Kit said about her a bit earlier. So she tells off Iskard, the king, and Rorsik, his toadying minister, for the way they’ve treated the planet, and wizardry, and their people, and Aurirelde, Isakard’s daughter, and Khretef, her sweetie from the other side of Mars, the Eilitt. Particularly Nita rages on at the blindness of wizards letting themselves slip into an ‘us or them, we have to use wizardry against them because they’d do it to us’ mentality.