A Fictional Sunset

Actually, this one has no fictionality at all

I'm starting to ease back into my routine of work and writing and editing and occasionally sleeping. I think I've got all the major programs I use installed on the VAIO now, and most of the settings imported or recreated. My user dictionary for Word didn't seem to be backed up on my external hard drive, so I took the opportunity to recreate a Mâvarin-specific one by spellchecking Heirs of Mâvarin and the first five chapters of Mages of Mâvarin. I could have grabbed the old dictionary off the old computer, but it occurred to me that it probably had a lot of obsolete character names in it. Better to start fresh.

Speaking of Mâvarin, I've finally gotten Chapter Four of Mages edited, and I'm most of the way through Chapter Five. And no, I haven't sent Heirs off to DAW yet, because John hasn't finished printing the manuscript. Guess I'd better do the rest of the printing myself!

Now that I'm more or less done with my computer issues and we've had a few rain-free days, I'm pretty much back to focusing on fiction, both my own and J K Rowling's. I'm halfway through Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and continually amazed at how short her early books are compared to the later ones.What does that say about my chances of selling Heirs (537 manuscript pages) or Mages (over twice that, but it's a trilogy) now, in 2007? I have no idea.

This one is completely unedited except for size and sharpen

Meanwhile, we had a rather pretty sunset tonight, and I happened to be driving from the office and through my neighborhood while it was going on. This gave me a few unusual vistas to show you. One of these is so colorful that I decided to give the photo a fictional treatment, boosting the colors and cloning out anything less than picturesque. Here's the original version, unedited except for resizing and a "sharpen lightly":


And here it is with a bit of a fairy tale treatment. I saturated, lightened, cloned, framed, and even spraypainted a little bit:


I thought about trying to turn the neighbor's house into a castle, but it seemed like a bit too much work for tonight. Maybe later!

Karen