My new read-only-while-working-out and thus incentive-to-work-out book is Bujold's The Sharing Knife. Once again I'm impressed by her sheer storytelling skills: world-building and character-building and problem statements in not a lot of prose, without expository lumps. One second you're reading her description of a farm, and the next second you're aware of how tenuous civilization is in that area. And then you know some kind of magic exists, and then you see it in use. Most excellent and inspirational.
I have a pile of about a million small presents for many of you. I need to get my act together and mail things. My theory is if I say it out loud here, I'll be embarrassed into doing it.
I personally love reading fic wittering, because it makes me feel less alone in my Dreadful Suffering (tm). So here's some.
The current story is approaching a first complete draft. This is a trifle misleading because some sections of it have been solid for weeks, and are fairly polished, and other sections are only now coming together. Though this did get a fairly detailed outline, so I've known for some time what needs to happen. I worked on the fight scene a bunch last night, which is a bit of a long-ish set piece. I think I'm going to have to sweat over it some more to make sure that it stays tight & tense, while the action is comprehensible. I have a pretty clear vision in my head of how it goes, but I need to find the right details to mention to evoke it in your heads while not over-specifying.
Hard work, but fun, and I'm learning a bunch as I go. It is, however, the slowest writing I've yet done. Words per hour rating is dismal.
And I owe tons to
glimmergirl for digging out her Greek grammar and translating some things for me. My plans for my second
summer_of_giles story change daily by whim. I do have a core plan that I keep returning to & thinking about, but I'm constantly tempted away. E.g., wickedfox's manip post yesterday included this tantalizing item: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Apocalypse, which is general enough to prompt a zillion funny stories in response, in any pairing or gen setup you can imagine. gileswench wrote one response as a quickie yesterday, which is hilarious. But I think the world needs more. 
