So far as my book is concerned, the war has officially started and to honor the commencement of hostilities, I’ve added a few new songs to the playlist.

They are…

• This Mortal Coil – Song to the Siren
• Sisters of Mercy – Colours

I have a habit of creating playlists that I listen to while I’m writing that put me in an appropriate mood for whatever tone or theme I’m going for and my current project is no exception.

So, I give you the Far From the War playlist. In case you couldn’t tell from the title, my current project is about war, suffering and death – oh, and did I mention it’s for teenagers? To say the playlist is slightly moody is a bit of an understatement. I advise you all to download these and let these songs bum you out until my words in print have a chance to do so. Enjoy.

• Tori Amos – Bells For Her
• Siouxsie and the Banshees – Dazzle
• Fiction Plane – Hate
• Echo and the Bunnymen – The Killing Moon
• Concrete Blonde – God Is a Bullet
• Depeche Mode – Fly On the Windscreen
• Front 242 – Headhunter
• Jimmi Hendrix – If 6 Was 9
• Jenny Lewis – Pretty Bird
• Nick Drake – Fly
• The Sundays – I Feel
• Simon and Garfunkle – April Come She Will
• Jose Gonzales – Heartbeats
• Massive Attack – Teardrop
• The Smiths – How Soon Is Now?
• U2 – Running To a Stand Still
• The Sundays – I Kicked a Boy
• Portishead – Wondering Star
• Tori Amos – Yes, Anatasia
• Regina Spektor – Laughing With

I sent off the last full requested on The Wavy Line yesterday and am now at liberty to write the next book without loose ends for the last book weighing me down.  I currently have three fulls outstanding and one partial still pending a response from Lucienne Diver.  She seems cool, so I shall keep my fingers crossed…

In the meantime, work has officially started on my next novel, Far From the War.  This is not a sequel to The Wavy Line.  This one starts a new series and is very different.  For openers, it’s not science fiction and I’m sort of writing it with a view to being a YA/Adult crossover series.  There’s considerable debate about what exactly makes a novel YA.  I’ve chosen not to worry about that too much.  My protagonist is a 17 year old girl, but other than that I’m not going to write it any differently.  I won’t assume my reader has any real knowledge of the Federal Reserve or the International Monetary Fund, but that’s where I draw the line.

I’m excited about this one.  It’s going to be dark and fatalistic.  Morrissey fans should love it.

Updates here, as they always are, will be infrequent.  Watch my Facebook status for up to the minute word counts.

The deck was built just in time for my much hyped Jamaican Independence Day celebration.  We had a good turnout and the deck did not collapse.  A few snaps from the event follow.  We’ll start with the grill area for which I built a pair of matching prep tables from the leftover lumber.

Here’s a wider view showing the picnic table and benches, also built from extra wood.

Here’s another angle that shows the notch we left our for the tree and a few cases of Red Stripe icing down the buckets.

The grill in use.

Kathryn enjoying an adult beverage.

So there you go.  No more parties or projects for at least a month or so.  Once I get the final draft of The Wavy Line out the door, I might consider a walnut coffee table.  Stay tuned.

So, the big project of the summer finally happened thanks to the help of Graham and Jason.  Here we are pondering the framing…

Here you can see many deck blocks and more framing…

Here we stand atop the completed frame…

Here the decking is almost complete…

And now we’re all done…

As it turns out, my mother is a little miffed that I didn’t develop a penchant for this stuff until relocation to Seattle.  I don’t know what to tell her other than buying a house must have activated some latent manliness genes.

The corner unit now has an adjoining DVD shelf. I finished this a few weeks ago and have just now gotten around to taking pictures.

I actually built this unit twice because the stain for the first attempt didn’t match. Ironically enough, the stain came from the very same can. I changed the design the second time around to include the open space in the center, which I think is cool and breaks up what might have otherwise been just a plain old shelf.

Shifting gears a bit, a lot of writers like to keep their Kimono wide open and blog about every little aspect of their creative process every day. In general I find that kind of thing a little gushy and self indulgent if done too often, particularly if you’re unpublished and have no sound reason to believe anyone would find your creative process interesting.
With that disclaimer and advance apology out of the way, I can say that I’ve learned a few things about how I work over the past few weeks. Since The Wavy Line was my first book, I can’t really claim to know that much about my process yet. I have learned that I don’t like editing that much. I like writing a first draft because you can let your enthusiasm for the project (inspiration, if you like) just carry you along and before you know it you’re staring at 150,000 words.
It’s not that I mind editing in principal or that I feel I’m not good at it. It’s just by that time, I have this backlog of energy building up for the next project (or the next two or three projects) and I desperately want to get past project A and move onto project B. This is dangerous for me right now because I have full requests pending on Project A and haven’t sent them off yet. I’ll be finishing up the last pass through The Wavy Line this weekend and will be able to move on to other projects, one of which I am particularly excited about.

Last night Kathryn and I went to the kick off of Tori Amos’ North American Tour.  She played a relatively obscure song off her Under the Pink album called Bells for Her.  I knew the song and being reminded of it helped crystalize the tone for one of the projects in my hopper.  I won’t go into details except to say that the project is called Far From the War.  It’s arguably YA/adult crossover and deals with a 17 year old protagonist trying to survive in the midst of a present day civil war.  Even though it deals with war and political themes, because it’s told from the perspective of someone not directly involved with politics or waging the war, it will not read like a political thriller.  It will be dark, upsetting and very, very sad.  Bells for Her, more than any other song, captures perfectly how I want the book to “feel”.  Whether I succeed at pulling this off or not is another issue, but it’s very encouraging to have such a clear vision of what you’re trying to achieve.

I suggest that my many readers hit up iTunes and download it immediately.

Like all of the finer things in life, this project begins with my custom built dado jig.  It cuts perfect dados for shelving using nothing more than a handheld router a a few clamps.

Next we get out the glue, the clamps and start the fun part…

All done…

Notice the opening the looks as though it might conveniently fit over a poorly placed vent?  Trust me, it’s there.  Next time we’ll sand and stain to match the corner shelf.

After some sanding and three coats of polyurathane, behold the corner shelf unit finally nestled into its corner.

You may notice that it looks a little unbalanced.  What it needs is another matching shelf coming off the right side.

With the big corner part glued up and finished, it is time to assemble the little side shelves…

Like all feats of woodliness, this requires a large number of clamps…

And the next day, we sand and stain. This stain makes it look slightly French, non?

Now I’m going to squeeze in a little editing before the Jenny Lewis concert.

Editors Note: Kathryn assisted with staining, but declined to be photographed while doing so.

Here I am mooning over wooden trapezoids…

Now it looks like a shelf!

Now it has a top!

Stay tuned for exciting reports on staining and multiple coats of varnish!