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July 20, 2008 Happy Birthday Inspector Javert! I still don't know what is up with the "every five months" routine I've got going, but here we are again. I'm making more changes, downsizing a few things here. Nothing you'll notice right off the bat. All the features are staying. I have more Gallery pics to upload and I have more reviews for the Media page (I'm about 7 eps in on the Shoujo Cosette series... it's FABOO) and yes there is work being done on Honor (heh, I started typing Adrift... it's déjà vu all over again!) My stated goal is to finish the book by year's end. I have a very good chance of accomplishing this. And then, for publishing... That will be a little different, too. And cheaper. For both of us. Stay tuned. ps: my old workhorse computer, which I've had since Sanctuary, finally kicked
the bucket. Meet my new compy, a beautiful widescreen laptop. So there's really no excuse
at all for me not to write everywhere and anywhere, is there? My first task will
be next week, when I go to my semiannual pilgrimage to pps: the link to the Livejournal below is no longer active. I dropped LJ for personal reasons. I have a blog set up for PauC but it's not live yet. Well, it is but there's nothing in it right now. Stay tuned for that as well...
Short update. I've completed adding the Ward illos to the Gallery, so, with the exception of a few bits and strays I'm trying to identify, that's probably the last major update for the Gallery for a long time, if not forever. Besides, 1200+ images is a very large amount of space. Also, I'm posting a few random chapters of what I've been working on for PauC. They're unbrushed and fairly raw, but it's a little bit of prose. My biggest issue is that I keep wanting to write the next segment when I have yet to finish this one, or the Australia segment. It's very distracting. I have a schedule more or less in place for working on it but I'm not announcing it because every time I do I get distracted from it or something else crashes down on me. Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead, you know. Anyway, the new bits of prose are not being posted in the Honor link. They're now hosted at pontauchange.livejournal.com especially since they're little bits here and there. I'll see how this works for awhile. Nothing like experimenting to shake off lethargy. Since they're part of a segment still in progress, the chapters are not numbered, but they are titled. And yes I know I'm opening a whole new can o'worms with this subplot, but it's been part of the story more or less since I imagined it. And there is a method to my madness, I promise you. And that's about it. I feel like I'm emerging from a long hibernation with this. I will finish this damn thing, one way or another, even if I'm the only one who ever reads it. Oh, and happy anniversary, Marius & Cosette.
And five months later still... I'm finally getting the website back on track. And the book. It feels like I finally got sole custody of my own creative offspring after a long and acrimonious court fight. So bear with me. I'm starting to upload the last of the pictures I have for the Gallery. There's still a ton of them, but as I'm not actively looking for them and the person who was actively looking for them is no longer submitting them, when I'm done, that'll be it. That's the bad news. The good news? With today's upload, there's now 1000 pictures up! I won't make 2000 but I will make maybe 1500. We'll see... Also added two more Media reviews. No pictures to with them as yet, so they'll show up as blank boxes, but when I can get pics I'll put them up. And I have a couple of letters for the Blotter. And hopefully by next time I'll have the next segment of Honor up for posting. Won't that be nice? And for those wondering, I disabled Nth Draft and created another Livejournal. My fourth. I am not revealing the ID at this time. It is friend-locked for the most part, so if you want to read what's on there you have to let me know here at the Blotter so I can friend you and enable you to read. Not only is my journal going to continue with short science fiction and fantasy and the occasional fanfic, but there will be PauC related stuff in there too available only through the LJ. And that's it for now. I'm updating again on the Pontmercy's anniversary next month. And from there... hopefully... we'll just keep on keepin' on.
August 20, 2007 Five months later... In the meantime I am pleased to announce the reopening of the Pont-au-Change message board. Formerly called "Under the Washerwoman's Boat" (a name which I still like, btw, and may adopt for something else later), this one is called "Under The Bridge" (as in, 'that's all water under the bridge', a synonymous phrase for 'that's in the past, it's behind us') There are a few starter areas set up for different discussions; more will be added later as more participation merits it. One small note about ranking: there's this thing with message boards that depending on how many posts you make, the higher rank you get. Everyone, including myself, starts out at the beginning rank, which is mouchard. There are five ranks in all, and you'll discover what the others are later. They get funnier the higher you go. However, you may notice that there are also two titles, neither of which you will attain on this board: one is Inspecteur, which is reserved for the global moderator who is watching the site for me, and the other is Victor Hugo, which is the administrator (in short, me), an irony I find personally amusing: generally the admin is considered the "god" of the board and since in the LM universe, Victor Hugo is the god and he thinks of himself as such, I assume the title on the board, even though I am not the god of his universe, rather I am the god of my own :-) ) (and before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, note that I am using the word "god" in the lower case, as synonym for deity. As Valjean could tell you plainly, God with a big G is not Victor Hugo :-D ) Anyway, read the notes on the boards before posting, there's the usual "be nice to each other" stuff and short explanations of why the categories are what they are and what sorts of things to post/not post in them. Get to know other PauC readers, and other fans of Hugo or his work. But just because there's a board it doesn't mean I won't keep up the Notes. This is the main point of information for the website, and so it will remain. See you back here in two weeks, if not sooner on the board. February 19, 2007 Three Months?? I knew I was a slacker but not that bad... dang! Well, anyway, here's what I have managed to do in the last ninety days: I finally had to say goodbye to my trusty old Tracker and sold my soul to a really evil car dealership for sixty easy payments. The JAVERT plates are going on the new car. It's black, sleek, stealthy, and yes, it's got a stick :-) But damn it's expensive. It's the nicest thing I will ever own. And no, I won't give you a ride home in it. I've been tinkering with book off and on but haven't made much headway, mostly because some personal crap is going on that I'm not going to go into here. I have managed to cobble together a little more of section two but it's not cleaned up enough to post, so, I'm aiming for the end of the month on that one. I have to finish section two and write all of section four before I can move forward from section five (the previous post). I had hoped to be farther along in the book by now but, again, reality has made it hard to keep on schedule. Sometime in the next month or so I will be reinstating the bulletin board. I am doing this for three reasons: one, because someone asked me to; two, because it will be monitored by someone else, so I don't have to distract myself with management; and three, because I agree that readers should have some kind of forum to interact with one another and, well, with me, in a place where others can read the answers. I think that would be kind of neat. One feature I do want to add to the message board, since there can be several threads at once, is a kind of Open Source area for proofreading the works in progress. This is a major change from the way things have been done in the past three books, relying too much on the whims of select people. So, what I would like to do is have a portion of the message board open to address editing issues. I don't need it for typos per se, although I seem to have a hard time spelling French words consistently :-) but what I'd really like it for is for grammar check (since, in echoing Hugo's style, occasionally I twist a sentence into a pretzel and I'm not sure if it connects in the right places of if I turned it into a moebius loop) and for continuity checks within the PauC version of things. As you all probably already know I have taken a few liberties with Hugo's version of the events, in order to suit my own. But since I have made several drafts of things sometimes I forget which ones are canon (the book versions) and which ones are previous drafts. My readers, however, seem to know exactly which version is the current one. So, any help I can get in any of these capacities will be most welcome. It will take a bit for me to set this up, but once it's up, hopefully some good will come from it. Other than that I have added two new volumes to the Bibliography and I am currently waiting breathlessly for intrepid Eliot to send me the first few episodes of yet another anime version of Les Misérables—this time a series!—called Shoujo Cosette. Yes, it's the adventures of poor little Cosette in the hands of the Thénardiers. OMG this is so dang cute I need a shot of insulin to watch it. It's still in raw Japanese, the series just premiered in Japan in January, and it's unfinished. I won't be posting a review on it for awhile. But if you didn't know it existed, here you go. Happy anniversary, Marius and Cosette. Here's to hoping it won't be so long until the next post...
November 17, 2006 I found a piece of book! Okay, so here's the story: way back five years ago when I first started tinkering with Honor I wrote the first section (the Guernsey stuff that starts every book) and half of the next section, "Galatea". When I took up the book again this year I bumped "Galatea" forward to section 3 and started a new section 2, "The Ends Of The Earth". Everyone okay with that so far? Here's where it gets weird: EOE is still work in progress. But somehow I managed to finish "Galatea". Which is good because it's been sitting half-done in my head for five years. However... EOE is still unfinished. It's turning out, if you can believe this one (heh) longer than originally intended. (oh, Arlene never writes large books!) So my options are to either hold everything back till EOE is completed or just go ahead and put "Galatea" on the site and go from there. It's been two months since an update; heck with it; I have elected to go with Plan B. So, "Galatea" is up. EOE will follow at an undetermined time, in its entirety. I would have just skipped it and left it for the print version like I did the end of Adrift but because it's Valjean and Javert stuff, I want to make sure that goes up on the site. Yes it's a little confusing since these are whole new characters you haven't really been introduced to (except, briefly, Mrs. Nichols) but at last we're at the pivotal plot lines that will shape the rest of the series. And yes, before you email me, I know that some of the information as presented in this section do not quite jibe with the information in the Epilogue of Resurrections. Rest assured, it will. Magically. Later. Other than that, nothing much going on.
I
do
have
a
few
pictures
from
my
vacation
to
Quebec
City
for
you
to
share
and
enjoy.
Also a new letter or two. Still have one
pending review to write. And that's about it.
The aforementioned almost done entirely new part two of Honor got thrown out in favor of an entirely new, entirely new part two. Or part one of part two. Okay, the first four chapters. It's been a little weird around here lately. Nothing more to add to that. It'll make loads more sense if you've actually read Adrift, but if not, well, first of all what are you waiting for, and second of all, you can connect the dots, or most of them anyway, even if you haven't. Still don't have the bookmark PDF file looking acceptable. So, one day. Heck, I still haven't come up with a permanent logo for this section yet! I do have two treats however. The first is a link to a website for a company whose car air freshener I bought. It's a little "escaped convict t-shirt" freshener that is now hanging in my car, which if you have been reading this site you know has the license plate JAVERT. That was his birthday present from a week and a half ago. The convict number is not 24601, but that's okay, I can deal with it... The second is a picture that Lindsay found for me. It would be funnier with a Javert cross street, but I'm satisfied with the big "STOP" sign. Followed, no doubt, by the phrase "in the name of the law!" My mom has read Adrift. She is a longtime mystery reader and aficionado and she didn't figure out whodunit before she got to the end of it, so I'm very happy about that. She said she enjoyed it lots. Right now Dad is halfway through it, as is Laura, so those juries are still out. However, I'm getting a little weirded out because I'm hearing the same feedback from all sides, to whit: "There's too much Marius and Cosette in this book!" Or, as Laura said (and had me laughing for hours, since she said it in this really huffy voice): "I'm at page 200 and I haven't seen a ship yet! I was TOLD there would be a ship in this book!" Of course, now she's at the ship part and she's shut up. But at least now she knows why I added a miniature barrel to my little shrine of PauC related knickknacks... In a couple of weeks I will be making my long-awaited trip to Quebec to visit all the places I wrote about five years ago in Sanctuary. I am really jazzed about the whole thing, I can't wait. I will be taking the laptop with me to work on the book, at least on the plane parts of the trip. Once I'm off the plane I plan to be in full vacation mode, but if all goes well I will be able to upload the rest of this section sometime later this month. This will be followed by section three, half of which is already done since it started out five years ago being section two. After that we're back in uncharted, unwritten territory, but if I can keep the pace up I should have Honor completed, or the web draft of it anyway, by the end of the year. After that, of course, will be the usual couple of months cleaning the thing up for publication, and out by spring so I can start Inferno next year. I am so looking forward to Inferno that I'm already plotting and sketching things for it. But my biggest wish right now is for Honor to be smaller than Adrift. I put Adrift on the shelf and saw it was twice the size of Resurrections. That's just too darned much book. My mother literally could not hold the book; it was too heavy for her, since she is elderly and has arthritis. So I brought her a second copy, sawed it down the middle of the spine, between the end of "Chains" and the beginning of "Forsaken", which by the way is a really good place to divide it, and I bound the pages with packing tape so they wouldn't fall apart. People gasp at me when I tell them I cut a book in half, like I'm one step away from burning them or something, but hey, it's only a book. There's plenty more where that came from. Well, back to work. I have spoken with my website host and their tech support is helping me set up a means by which hotlinking to images will be disabled. If it works, and I hope it does, then I can start putting pictures back up. If not, I have no idea what I'm going to do. Hoard them, I guess. Until next time... June 7, 2006 One A.M. Pacific time. A moment of silence... Well, Adrift is in the bookstores, in a figurative sense; I sold out of my author's copies and won't see royalties for about three months but oh well. Thanks to all who bought copies from me, it helped a lot! And with that, Adrift is behind me. Honor is in front of me. Here we go again. Not much of an update for Barricade Day (or Javert Is In Seine Day, whichever you celebrate). Part one is back up. I almost have an entirely new part two done. I got some more letters for the Blotter. I have about five new media versions to review and no time to do it in, so that's on the back burner till I can get a few hours alone with a working VCR. Welcome to real life. New job, same old stuff going on. Not much to report, for an anniversary posting. I'm too darned tired and it's still 100 degrees outside at midnight so my brains are fried. I have tons more Gallery pictures to fold into the Gallery but it's not going to work until I get more webspace, so, Gallery is still down. Next month, for Javert's birthday, I will get more stuff to put up. I told the people who bought books from me that I was going to have bookmarks for them as well; that didn't work out. Adobe is not my friend. However, I'm getting close. So, for Javert's birthday I will have downloadable PDFs of bookmarks and sundry for the books and the website. If I don't snap the Photoshop disk in half, that is. And, for the third time, I present the first part of the fourth book. Enjoy...
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