LMB guest-blogs at EOS Books

Lois McMaster Bujuld, author of the "Vorkosigan" SF series and the "Chalion" fantasy series, is guest-blogging this week at the EOS Books blog. In her first posting today, she talks about some of the differences between her writing habits and those of other writers:

It was suggested that among things of interest to readers I might post in my week of guest blogging would be out-takes, discarded bits and pieces of the recent book that would show my writing process at work. Now, there are as many processes as there are writers, but mine doesn't leave much on the cutting room floor readable by any eyes other than mine (and sometimes not even by mine — what word was that penciled squiggle intended to be . . . ?), because most of my structural revision takes place at the outline stage, which is ornate and multi-layered, more resembling thinking out loud on paper than anything else. After the first draft goes onto the page, revisions, for me, tend to be a line here, a paragraph there, partial re-tooling of a scene, but very seldom wholesale slaughter of bad ideas that didn't grind to a halt quite fast enough. This is not only because my prose sets up like concrete and I have to revise with a jackhammer, and I hates it, Precious, although there's an element of that, too.

Also, for those interested, the sample chapters from her latest book, The Sharing Knife: Beguilement are available here. While I must admit that the book didn't grab me as much as her "Chalion" books have done, this is only the first half of the story, so I'm still hoping that the second part (due out next year) will be more to my — admittedly uneducated — taste.