Joe Haldeman Update

For those of you who didn't hear the news elsewhere, Joe went into the hospital Saturday night for emergency surgery for a twisted intestine. He's going to be in the hospital for a while, in ICU, but Gay says that things are under control and Joe's mostly sleeping through the recovery stage.

Good healing vibes would never be amiss, though, if you have any to spare.

Gay's posting updates at: http://webnews.sff.net/read?cmd=xover&group=sff.people.joe-haldeman

writerish updates

Last night, courtesy of a hard push and a whiskey cocktail (a modified Algonquin, actually), I hit the end of the revisions for Pack of Lies. And there was much damned relief.

This revision was both a lot of fun, and deeply annoying -- my editor, normally quite precise in her comments, came back to me originally with notes along the lines of "something's wrong, something's missing, but i don't know what it IS," so a lot of my work initially involved taking those notes and my notes and trying to see if I could figure out what "it" was.

And I did. And then I had to break down the book and fix what wasn't working and add in what was missing, and twine it all together so that the original material and the added material worked together seamlessly. Which was fun. And really really slow going. And occasionally horribly frustrating.

And now it will go back to Madame Editrix, who will tell me if I did it right.

And so this morning, I woke up at 5:30, my brain ready to get back to work on VINEART 2. Which is due in...eeeeep, 23 days.

If anyone needs me, you know where I'll be.

EtA: and happy birthday, Bruce! That's right, Springsteen turns 60 today. I expect the September 30th show will prove that 60 is the new 40 whatever Bruce damn well wants it to be.

author's notes: backstory of the backstory

Random bit of trivia, mainly because it came up in a reader's comment today:

"Jerzy" is a Polish variant of George. I wanted a name for my hero that clearly showed that he was NOT a Standard Whiteboi Hero [he's actually from the land-mass that would have been southern Russia, more or less, with a trace of the steppes], and the thought of a hero named George pleased me. So now you know.

( some spoilery thoughts on names and world-building )