The weather outside is frightful

So here I am, inside, having spent the day watching snow fall, writing a little bit more in my novel, watching Medium, and eating popcorn and hot cocoa. I also played a lot of Bejeweled Blitz, a game app on facebook, which I really hate lately. It's mainly a teaser, to get people to buy the full app, which I did. My family is much more into it than I am now. My youngest daughter, 9, is beating us all.

I finished chapter 4 of Tales of Uncle, my WIP, at long last, then did some tweaking on the whole story so far to add prominence to the upcoming battle. Anything to avoid chapter 5, which takes place right after the battle. Chapter 4 did what my stories usually do, namely ignore everything I was trying to do and going its own way. I wanted to tell a story about necromancy and other gicky things, but it instead became a story about stories about necromancy and other gicky things. (Sort of like Medium is a story about what being a psychic does to a wife and mother's life, chapter 4 is a story about being a story-teller and what it does to his life.) I'm sure I'll be revising that one at some point.

Chapter 5 is supposed to be a transitional type of chapter, involving a story told to a man as he lays dying. But I imagine it will be very difficult to do a somber spiritual piece at high speed, and I'm dreading the task. I'll probably end up telling a totally different story by the time I'm done. Then I can move on to the more present-day parts of the book, with chapter 6 telling how Fenita destroys the enemy armada by herself. That should be fun.

My publisher started a new blog for the Echelon Explorations line she's starting. We're supposed to be blogging about a variety of things to promote our sci-fi/fantasy/steampunk/paranormal/weird stuff books. Unfortunately the blogs apparently need to be approved and she's off in Pakistan or somewhere, so nothing new is going up. She also has a couple of new marketing directors for the Quake and Shorts lines, which is good. I should post more there, but I don't have any new stories coming out. I have a novel and 3 shorts hanging fire at the moment.

I also found the latest Tanya Huff novel at the library, a nice little book called The Enchantment Emporium. It has an interestingly convoluted magic system that isn't quite as clear as I would like, but quality-wise its up there with Summon the Keeper. I hope she can keep up that level of complexity. There's much more of a push to publish with follow-up books.

I created a new query for my novel, a dialog form that works much better to catch the dual plotlines of the story. Not going over very well, though. It turns out many agents went on a query-break for the holidays, but several who didn't have looked it over and told me the form is not a good one. Ah, well.