Weekend projects

For a number of years my friend Stacey and I used to make quilts together. This was not a casual hobby done over the course of months or years, but a form of competitive quilting known as "Quilt in a Day" projects. At the start of the day we would arrive at the sewing room with a sewing machine, supplies, yards of newly washed fabric, and our box lunches. At the end of the day we would walk out of the room with a finished quilt.

Later, when making one quilt had become too easy, we would make two. At this point the other quilters in the group began to hate us.

When someone asked me to explain what we did, I said "We take yards of perfectly good fabric, cut them up and then sew the pieces back together again."

Put that way, it does sound like an odd way to spend a Saturday.

The quilt days were twice a year, and one was always on a Saturday in October. So it's no surprise that I was thinking of Stacey today, as I was working on the revisions to THE FIRST BETRAYAL. Today was a day for small changes-- a sentence here, a paragraph there. Ripping out the stitches that joined one scene to another, and figuring out a new way to join the pieces. Writing and discarding a half-dozen versions of the same paragraph until I have one that conveys just what I need it to. Painstaking work but the end results will be worth it.

In other news, the royalty statements for DEVLIN'S LUCK and DEVLIN'S HONOR arrived in the mail, along with a nice check. Bantam has kept the series in print, and it's gratifying to know that new readers can walk into a book store and find these books on the shelves.

And if you didn't see this earlier in the week, Elizabeth Bear matociquala wrote an interesting post on the lifecycle of a book.