I am returned from my relatively brief holiday sojourn, and aside from suffering allergy attacks in San Diego and flying home with congestion that hardened into a head cold, I enjoyed my trip. I actually got back almost two days ago, but since I've spent at least 30 of the preceding 45 hours in bed, and most of my waking time sniffing, sneezing, working on a cough (getting pretty good at it, thanks), and itching my puffy, reddened eyes, you can perhaps forgive my laggard blog posting.
At least I got back without delay; plenty of
American air travelers did not.
DENVER - Denver's snowed-in airport reopened Friday for the first time in two days, but the backlog of flights around the country could take all weekend to clear, and many of the nearly 5,000 holiday travelers stranded here might not make it home for Christmas.
As planes began taking off again, passengers with long-standing reservations filled most of the outbound flights. That was bad news for those waiting to rebook flights canceled during the storm.
"Unfortunately, this comes down to basic math," said airport spokesman Chuck Cannon. "You've got thousands of people standing in lines, and the airlines do not have thousands of seats."
The departure of a Frontier Airlines flight for Atlanta a few minutes after noon was greeted glumly by Christina Kuroiwa, a Fort Collins, Colo., woman who had been trying to get to San Jose, Calif.
"Well, I guess that's good for them, but it really doesn't help me," said Kuroiwa, who had actually gotten on a plane Wednesday, only to sit stuck in the snow on the runway for 8 1/2 hours.
That sort of thing is why I 1) only fly between cities with (relatively) warm weather, and 2) do so on the 16th and 20th, rather than waiting for core Xmas travel days with core Xmas travel crowds. Then again, I live in a city without snow, my relatives live in San Diego, and I don't have a job to prevent me from taking my Xmas vacation a week early. So it's not as if I'm a representative sample. I just remember spending a night and then 12 hours the next day in the Houston airport several years ago, walking from gate to gate, (unsuccessfully) getting on the stand by list for flights to San Diego. The fact that the weather outside was clear and cool, and that the delay was due to snow or ice in other airports hundreds of miles away (such as Dallas) was what really galled me.
Anyway, this year's visit to the parents was fine, we did fun stuff and imbibed turkey and holiday cheer, and now I'm back to continue placing my feet in the fire of getting this damn fantasy novel published ASAP. (To mangle a metaphor.) I took the print out along with me to San Diego (ridiculous carry on luggage weight; the whole novel is a good 8 inches stacked up, small font) and read a fair amount of it there, and I'm finishing it up back here. It's way, way too long, I know that, but I can see where/how to make cuts. It'll hurt though; chapter two is going from something like 211 pages down to about 40, and those 271 pages aren't all shit; they're just not part of the flow of the rest of the book. Chapter 3 will get similar trimming, and then 4 and 5 as well, to a lesser extent. Six through eight are more balanced, in terms of content and pace and such, so I'm hoping they won't seem so in need of hacking, when I reread them in a day or two.
Basically, I started off the novel about this old necromancer/wizard and the young thief he meets in a cemetery. (As most of you probably read in
the sample version of that chapter, posted more than four years ago.) They escape from the city with lots of dudes after them and take refuge in a hidden cave. Chapter two-four then told of their cave, a long chase across the land through forests and over mountains, to the land to the Necromancer's home, and then to a distant land where the story really gets going. There's a ton of conversation and lots of chasing events and world history and combat training and ancient mysteries and so forth, but the very basic plot outline in this paragraph pretty well sums it up. Which is fine, except that I can't have it take 1/2-2/5 of the book's length, when chapters 5-8 are from the POV of multiple other characters, and cover huge wars, city sieges, quest conclusions, introduce numerous new characters, cover events all across the world, etc.
I could possibly have the whole book be a relatively small story of two or three main characters on their long quest, interacting only occasionally with other people, but I think that would get boring and seem insufficient. I can’t have half the book do that, and half do something very different and much broader in scope, though. Which is why I need to trim down at least 3/4 of the opening half, while working in more foreshadowing to the big events that come later. And that's my job/chore for the remainder of December and into January, while free time remains. That and working on a short synopsis for the whole thing, crafting query letters to agents, finding likely agents to send said letters to, and so forth.
By the way, if anyone's got a relative running a literary agency, or owning say, Random House, now would be a good time to speak up.
Labels: holidays, the fantasy novel, travel
