Category: General

Thanks, Mark, again, for tweaking the site. It’s coming along, and I appreciate your help.

Last night’s activity was getting around with peeps from my writing group to plan out a group activity for reading at Wiscon. We’re going to do a great presentation with Julie Rose, Yolanda Joosten, Jenn Racek and myself reading, punctuated with a music track laid by Jools, and awesome artwork from Cat Horsfield for each story.

Then, to prove to myself what a crap proofreader I am, I applied spell check to the first seven chapters of Substance. Oh, never give me a job as an editor! I need proofreaders, I do!!!

Right. I’m teaching right now, gurgling gall bladder or no. I hope to do some writing tomorrow night while I’m waiting for a meeting, but there’s all that being gone for a week crap to do. I hope I feel like writing after the surgery some, because there wil be a lot of time.

Mata ashita ne!

Catherine

When you least need it, procrastination hits at work. But I am so tired, and in pain, so eh, what you gonna do?

While I was procrastinating, I reinstated some links on my links page so it’s mostly functional. I published an excerpt page from Substance of Shadows, the Esme’s Trial scene as it stands revised, and I added my bio page from the old site, now retitled “Your Host.”

I want to get a picture of myself on the front page and on the Your Host page yet.

Also, I want to make sure people can see the page links, so they know there’s somewhere else to go besides the blog.

Pages to do:

Wares: Stories I’m currently writing/peddling.
Excerpts: A few more excerpts to tantalize
Appearances: Riiiigggghhhtttt…but may need this in the future.

Mark, you can pretty much delete what I have at coffeebear now. I think I’ve salvaged everything I want from there.

For the rest of you: you can now reach me at

cathschaffstump.com

Update accordingly.

Catherine

Amanda Welkin and Sara Wolf are one…up through page 205.

And that’s all. On to chapter 8! Work and caucuses tomorrow, work Friday, so maybe more Friday night.

Guts on the down swing. Time to bind Stephan to the main villain. It’s that kind of mood.

Started making page for links to reduce amount of blank spaces on pages due to long side bar.

Catherine

I’m catching up here at Writer Tamago, mostly with being alive. 🙂 Surgery will be either Wednesday or Friday next week, and frankly, the situation is escalating to the extent that I may have to claw the gall bladder out of my abdomen before then. (Don’t say euw. Say hrm. Consider the possibilities.)

Anyway, have I been doing anything writerly in the last two days? Yes. My friend Mark has helped me work on some of the bits and pieces of the site. If you click on the about page, you can actually see a picture of me, and it doesn’t look so rudimentary. One thing I wonder about is this: can I reduce the amount of just blank color after the descriptive paragraph? I’ll have to ask Mark.

Anything else? Our multimedia group for Wiscon has scheduled a time to chat.

Today is my last day away from my job at Kirkwood, gall bladder flaring notwithstanding (imagine a gall bladder, nostrils flared, hoofing the ground, and all you have to fight it with is a red sheet and a couple of Advil. Or not.).
As soon as I am done doing internet things, which is taking a while today, I will buckle down and write.

The plan today:

Combine Sara and Amanda into one entity
Proofread chapter 8.

Ambitious? Sure. Hot to do it while I’m feeling okay. Sure.

I’ll report back tomorrow or Friday accordingly. Take care, everyone.

Catherine

Right. So I’ve revised chapter seven. I’m all ready to go into chapter eight.

Or I was. Bryon suggested to me today on the way to the surgeons that there are lots of ways Sara and Amanda could be folded into one character, and I agree.

So, goodbye to Sara Wolf. Amanda Welkin will take her role in the story, and still be a corner, magical, all that. That means I’m going to have to go through the Esme’s Trial part of the book and make that happen. It’ll make the book better though, I can see that. I will do it as quickly as possible, breeze through chapter eight, and move into the Errol’s Trial section, which will require much more direction and polishing.

Meanwhile, it’s gall bladder surgery on the 9th or the 11th, and A WEEK off after. I’m supposed to walk and relax. I wonder if there will be writing time? I wonder if I will feel like it? If so, it’ll be a great opportunity to catch up to where I want to be.

Happy writing, all!

Catherine

Today was a little more website tweaking, and a little organizing for a reading group at Wiscon. We have a big shindig at Chez Stump tomorrow, so had to do some cooking and prepping for that. I have A LOT of work to do on the website, but I will finish the rewrite first. That’s the way it’s gotta be.

It is my plan to write tomorrow morning before I take off for town to go to see the surgeon. So there should be progress to report then.

The best, brightest, and shiniest of New Year’s to you!

Catherine

This is me, checking out my new ability to post from Writer Tamago to my live journal. You can comment at Writer Tamago, or here. With the able bodied help of my friend Mark, we’re working on making Writer Tamago more writerly.

Tamago is a Japanese word. It means egg. A piece of useful Japanese slang: if you are a “fill in the blank” egg, it means you are a new or beginning “fill in the blank.” I figured there would be very few Writer Tamago sites out there in name, although plenty in deed.

Today, the first thing to show off are my new writer pictures, which will be peppered here and there about the site. Here’s how you get to that gallery:

http://pics.livejournal.com/awelkin/gallery/00036gxa

Let me know which ones you like! Thanks to afore mentioned able bodied friend Mark for taking these pictures.

And, by the way, I registered https://www.cathschaffstump.com today, so as soon as we get all the nice new stuff ready to go, we’ll get it switched over to there.

La, la, la really am rewriting Substance of Shadows first.

Catherine

You wouldn’t know it from the amount that isn’t being written about here.

Until Mark and I get together and give this baybee an overhaul, which should happen before Christmas, especially more important as soon as I start shopping Substance of Shadows to agents, which will probably happen sooner than I know, most of what I’m up to is over at

Cath Schaff-Stump at livejournal

Eventually we will get that site to talk to this site.

Why the switch? I find that I can build a peer community at the lj site, and easily read agent, editor, and author logs. A site like this one exists to be read, but I want my site to help me network, and I want to know what’s going on in the writing life of others too. Vive la friend’s list!

At any rate, this is where you can now get the lowdown on what’s cooking, who’s got what, and what I’m doing. I’m making SERIOUS concerted effort to climb the mountain of publication, and I’m learning a lot as I research, write, and read.

SO, come over, friend me there.

Expect an overhaul of the site before Christmas.

Follow various links to other writing buddies.

And that’s all.

Catherine

I’ve decided to pull down the Klarion Scroll.

I had the idea that it would be a place where people would talk about writing, but there are lots of places like that out there, and a lot of my friends look elsewhere for information about me. With that in mind, I decided that since its primary purpose was spam magnet, it had to go.

Mark and I are going to be revamping the site soon–updating, changing the blog back into something readable, and giving myself a more professional sheen, especially once that I get Substancecirculating. I have been writing a lot, and I’m a little over half way through revising and reformulating the Substancemanuscript and beginning the great agent hunt.

It’s the next great mountain to climb. I know you all think I’m good, and you’re rooting for me. I’m not as intimidated at convincing strangers I’m good after the last Wiscon, and that’s the reason for the flurry of activity.

At any rate, after school gets going again, after a string of vacations and conventions, things will look different here. I’ll be trying to correlate this blog and a live journal site I have for writing which allows me to look at other writers journals more readily.

Thanks, all, for sticking with me. I know my internet legions have dwindled down to an army of what, 10, but we are mighty! However, I didn’t see the need for the Scroll anymore, and I’m sure you won’t miss it.

Catherine

It’s like someone lit a fire. Here’s where we’re at:

1. Blood Submission at Delirium.
2. A revision of two short stories for a Gothic anthology from Cat Scratch Press. (in progress)
3. A READY TO GO book treatment and submission for Substance. (looking for targets now)
4. A READY TO GO Abby and Vince story at Strangehorizons.com
5. Research into writing organizations
6. Research into agents.

We’ll be doing this thoroughly.

Catherine