!
THIS is Jo Walker, the main character for the Walker Papers, only Jo has Sharon-Stone short-cropped hair. Other than that, Jo looks just like her. They're even the exact same *height*.
Her real name is Carmen, and I went to high school with her. I've been searching for pictures for MONTHS, and this site that used to not have her picture now does!
*plunges into the net again, seeing if I can find more pictures*!
Plan for the night:
--Work on novella (titled BANSHEE CRIES unless Matrice says otherwise) proposal
--Yell at the TV because Bush is such an idiot
--Give some money to the DNC
--Obtain dinner. Possibly by dialling Pizza Hut
Cover me. I'm goin' in.
Fwoosh. Finished all the bugs. Waiting to see if any more come in. I certainly hope not.
Wish it would stop raining. I'd like to go for a walk, but I don't much want to go in the soppy weather. I guess I could try to find my raincoat and pants. Still, blah.
Let's see. Maybe I'll fold some laundry, 'cause I know how to have fun. :)
Still need a work icon. Hm.
music: Bon Jovi, This Left Feels Right
Still raining.
I believe it may rain forever. My dad bought a kayak yesterday. It's in our garage now. It's only a one person kayak, which isn't really very ark-like, but it'll do in a pinch.
Gymmed this morning.
That's all.
miles to Lothlorien: 282
How can it POSSIBLY only be 1pm?
I have made bread, cleaned the kitchen, started laundry, fixed bugs, taunted Deborah, and believed six impossible things before breakfast, which really seems like enough for one day to ME!
And yet it is only 1pm. And it is raining and quite miserable out, which makes me *completely* uninterested in going on a walk, even if Chanti wishes I would. OTOH, I put her out a while ago and she came gallumphing back to the door almost immediately, so she obviously doesn't think much of the weather either.
Blah. Wish it would snow. At least that's prettier than rain.
*laugh* I just went and looked at the forecast on adn.com. It said:
:)
The hard part about working out is getting up to go to the gym.
Fortunately, we accomplished it again this morning, which I maintain now means we have critical mass for the week and can't possibly sleep in tomorrow and screw things up. Besides, I woke up at 5am, so I wasn't really sleeping well anyway. Ted's hope of not getting up was doomed from the start. :)
Go go SpaceShipOne!
Let's see, what else. Oh, I sent a synopsis critique to someone, and I was reasonably certain she was going to hate me, because I picked on several flaws with the structure of the story (they were of the particularly aggravating sort, because the bones of the story are good and it was one of those, "If you can fix these few things, you'll have a *great* story," but they do require a fair amount of rewriting), but she said she doesn't hate me and that I'd illuminated some things that she had been bothered by but hadn't been able to quite put her finger on. So whew. :)
All right. Sweaty and starving now. Must find food and a shower, not necessarily in that order, and, um, anything else? Nope, not right now.
miles to Lothlorien: 280
Now I need a work icon. Hrm.
Anyway. You know, when there's a very specific task, like bug fixing, with rapidly achieveable results, I really enjoy my job a lot more than I do when I'm even doing stuff like building new sites. I don't know why that is exactly, because you'd think site development would be just as focused and interesting (or more so) than bug fixing, but for some reason it seems like I'm mostly happiest at my job right now when I'm fixing fiddly little things.
On the up side, they're paying out phase one of phase two of the retention bonus next week (phase two of phase two will hopefully come in shortly before Christmas, but heaven knows what'll really happen), which is an unexpected plus. As Shaun said, it's *not* that bad a job.
And as of Friday, I think, we're on code freeze until heaven knows when, as we start to develop all our sites all over again on the new parent company's platform. That should actually be interesting. I hope. :)
Ow. Hiccuping. o.O
Wooooow, wouldn't I love to do this someday!
edit: ooh. we discover that 1 line posts and the icons are not a happy combination! Interesting! Bad icons! Bad!
Hm. I may have to redesign the site somewhat now. But hooray, I have icons! *dancie dance*
Gymmed again this morning, which is good because it is once more dumping horrible cold almost-snow rain (snain) and I certainly don't want to go walking in it. Blah. And ick. And brr, too.
I have very little brain this morning. Skipped the RWA meeting last night because I just wasn't in the mood, and worked on some editing, which was much more what I was in the mood for, and ... boy, my life is boring. :)
miles to Lothlorien: 278
This is a test entry to see if I can figure out how to make icons work with MT.
edit: I can! I can! Now I just have to figure out how to make it all wrap properly! Garrett rocks!
I am now getting upwards of 1500 spam messages a month. That's fifty a day. I believe I may switch my email address over from kit to something-else at mizkit dot com. Anybody got an opinion on what the something else should be? 'catie' does seem like the obvious choice...
I don't know why, but the weekend turned out to be surprisingly long-feeling. Maybe it was the miserable weather. It snowed all day Saturday, wet heavy snow that broke one of my lilacs and the tree at the side of the house :(, and then it rained all day yesterday. Chanti and I went for a walk when it was only sprinkling. Unfortunately, for about every 5 minutes we were outside, it started raining noticeably harder, and by the time we'd walked our 2 miles we were completely and totally soaked through. By 1.5 miles, even Chanti didn't think this was a very good idea, and on the home stretch she was trying to run home because she was so cold and wet and miserable. Poor puppy. :)
Emily arrived on Thursday; Emily's kitten arrived on Saturday evening. He's a cute kitten, with far more tail than seems necessary for a bobtail. He was also very brave, although Emily shot down our suggestions to name him Livingstone. She also refused to name him James Brown, which I proposed after he let go a little "WOW!" of a meow. She's no fun at *all*. :)
Between the arrival of the Emily and the arrival of Livingstone James Brown the kitten, we went to see "The Forgotten", which had one scary moment that had me more or less fall out of my chair, which my back didn't appreciate, and we had ice cream and um did some other good stuff too. :)
Ted made REALLY GOOD dinner on Saturday, halibut with skordalia sauce, which is a Greek garlic sauce and is v. yummy, on top of a bed of tomato salad and crunchy bread. It was insanely good. And I made lemon cake, which was also good, for dessert. :) So that was a lovely evening. Mom and Dad came over and we ate and talked and had fun. :) And the lights had gone out in half of Anchorage, so Shaun'd gotten to come home early from work, so the gang was all there! Yay!
Ted and I went to see "Wimbledon" yesterday, which we both enjoyed a lot. I might even go see it again in the theatre, although boy, I tell you what, 8 commercials. There were 8 commercials before the previews even started. I'm seriously considering not going to Regal Cinemas again, because man, I really don't like paying to watch commercials. :P
Umm. I think that's about it! :) Oh, except Ted and I went to the gym this morning! Yay! :)
miles to Lothlorien: 275
Which of the Original Wolfriders Are You?
by Peacepine at For Elf Eyes Only.
I'd have been v. disappointed with anyone else. :)
Edited to add the other quizzes:
What Elfquest Creature Are You?
by Peacepine at For Elf Eyes Only.
What Elfquest Leader Are You Most Like?
by Peacepine at For Elf Eyes Only.
(Disappointed Ember wasn't a choice!)
Edits are typed in. I hate this book. o.o It has been sent to my trusty test readers for continuity and structure and pacing consideration, and now I am going to Not Think About It for the next 72 hours.
What I *am* going to think about is my rewrites on my short story that I have been failing to do since like MAY. jesus, kit. So that is the weekend goal, and Monday I will start dealing with feedback on HEART OF STONE.
Right now I'm going to go take a nice walk with my puppy dog. :)
ytd wordcount: hell if I know. More than 250K. Go me. :)
Ted's computer is clunking and preparing for catastrophic hard drive failure. It refused to boot a minute ago. Now he's got it booted and is frantically backing things up to port to my computer so he doesn't lose everything. Eep!
In other news, we have an Emily til Sunday, for she is a sucker and is getting another cat. :) And, let's see, what else. I've got a couple of victims readers for the HoS revisions, so I need to get my edits done and get those sent to them. And...
And it is a beeooooteeful day out. It's also cold, so while the beeeoooteee makes me want to go for a walk, the cold does not. I'll suck it up and go in a little bit, though. :)
I'll also call the Audi people. Whee.
miles to Lothlorien 269
The Audi, I am now told, is an Audi that was specifically designed for Ireland. I forebear to ask why a car designed for Ireland has a speedometer that goes to 160mph, because no one but a madman would even attempt that kind of speed, even if it were possible to achieve on Irish roads, on Irish roads. Anyway. Not the point. Because it is a car designed for Ireland, apparently the Audi people are now calling England to find out if anybody there knows what kind of speedometer it's supposed to have. Personally, I think I might call Ireland, but perhaps the big Audi center for the islands is in England. I don't know.
This has almost reached the point of absurdity, but I'm not quite to the breaking point where I start thinking it's all pretty funny. An Irish Audi. I don't know, somehow I feel like I sort of deserve that, or something...
*laugh*
Bow down! you are the Queen! whatever you say,
goes. You have a large dose of confidence but
dont let that get to your ego! Surrounded by
wealth and soaking in power, you are the face
that everyone knows and looks to for stability.
A true leader, you know right from wrong and
how to fix a tough situation. Long Live the
Queen!
What Renaissance Type Woman are you? (with pics)
brought to you by Quizilla
Am on page 297 of edits. Either this is less Frankensteiny than I thought, or I'm too close to see the problems. A few places to develop things have struck me, and I've been making notes about consistency, but so far it seems to be holding together remarkably well.
Still waiting for the proverbial Other Shoe to drop.
Lucy is an insanely demanding lap kitty this morning. Which is a bother if you're trying to do, you know. Anything. But it's very cute. :)
Am on page 175 or so of HoS edits. Nothing egregious so far. Some gregious stuff, but nothing egregious. Am starting to hold out faint hope for the book.
And now back to the grindstone (going to work late today, get to edit til 11am).
It stopped raining long enough for Chanti and me to walk 3 miles, so that's something, anyway. And my work needs somebody around late tomorrow, so I'm not going to work til 11, which should mean a few hours of quality editing time tomorrow morning. That'll be good!
Ummm. *looks around* Guess that's about it, then.
miles to Lothlorien: 267
Edited a hundred pages of HoS last night, but I haven't gotten to the icky stuff yet. A lot of the early stuff is more or less unchanged (er, except the whole new plotline in there), so it's pretty solid. I think it's around chapter 10 or 12 that it starts becoming unbelievably awful. :)
Had a bit of a panic this morning because I couldn't find the ink that goes with the Amazing Glass Pen that Sarah sent me. That pen, because it is very, very important to me, is my Contract Signing Pen, and I was just not gonna sign the contract with a different one. I had to clean my desk and then shove things around on the kitchen counter before I found the ink (which is now safely back in the box with the pen where it belongs), and the contract is in the mail. Yay!
It is raining cats and *dogs*, man. I don't wanna walk my miles in this weather! Wah! Soppy Kit!
miles to Lothlorien: 264
I like checking the mail and finding a contract in it!
As I don't have a title yet, for the purposes of the contract, the novella is being called CATIE'S WINTER MOON, which inevitably reminds me of Spidey coming to visit me in Fairbanks in January and being astonished to see the moon in the sky, as he'd somewhat dubiously concluded that if we only had 3 hours of sunlight, we must also not get moonlight. *laugh*
Contract! Yay! *ha cha cha cha cha CHA*!
The Audi people called this morning to tell me they still know nothing. Apparently they're talking to the German head company trying to figure this out, because nobody in this country can figure out why the piece doesn't fit. *sigh* The Germans, it seems, also have not come up with a snap answer. This is very annoying.
In other news, did you know it's really quite easy to submit a book for consideration for the Newberry Award? Sort of like the Nobel Prize; as long as somebody puts it in the pot, they'll at least consider it, apparently. Now if Tor would just buy ANGLES....
It's unexpectedly lovely out this morning. I hope it holds; I haven't been walking much 'cause of the rain (and the rewrites) and I want to do more.
Got a new printer cartridge, yay! And that's really about all the news there is today. More later, mebbe.
miles to Lothlorien: 260
Trent's reading IMMORTAL BELOVED and apparently enjoying it quite a lot. *happy little dance* That's always nice to hear. :)
I've spent half the day waiting for my site that I'm working on to come back up, and now that it has I just sort of want to glare at it.
Pizza bad. Oooky tummy. Bah. :P
Oh well, it was good when I ate it. :)
Ran out of printer ink, so I've only got half a manuscript printed out, and at Jai's behest I posted for my beta readers in the Sekrit Posting Place despite it still being Frankenstein's Manuscript. I will be taking a belt sander to the manuscript this evening and dealing with stuff that I was too tired to deal with by the time I got to the end and trying to get rid of some of the zillions of repeated phrases and stuff.
I am SO GLAD the big work on this is done. SHEESH. *pant pant pant*
Oh, and then we finished watching season 3 Alias. We are such suckers. Also, we are all tv'd out now.
STARVING. MEOW. MEOW. MEOW!
miles to Lothlorien: 259
Done! Done done DONE! Frankenstein's manuscript (aka HEART OF STONE) is DONE! And 65 pages and a chapter longer than the original, too, even with at least one chapter cut out wholesale.
I've gotta print it out and do a lot of cosmetic surgery on it at this point, because there's just crap all over the place that's messy and awful and stitched in and held in place with big ugly bolts, but the big work is DONE. DONE!
I'm having pizza for dinner, dammit. o.o :)
breakfast is had, alias is watched, sky captain was great fun, now back to frankenstein's manuscript. on ch. 24 now. have 29 chapters written.
zoom.
miles to Lothlorien: 257
*helpless giggles* I went to a beginning tap class last night (lots of fun!) and then Ted and I went out to dinner and decided that the 9:30 show of Sky Captain meant we'd probably be staying up too late, so we decided to come home and watch a couple of episodes of Alias and go to bed at a sensible time.
Six episodes later, at 1 in the morning, there was FINALLY enough of a lull at the end of an episode that we were able to stagger off to bed, giggling hysterically from both sleepiness and silliness. Weak! We are WEAK in the face of Alias! It was a lot of fun, though. *more giggling*
All right. Time to get a glass of water, find a bottle of lotion, and sit down to tackle Frankenstein's Manuscript again.
miles to Lothlorien: 255
So first the Audi people said they couldn't get us in to their shop until the 8th of September. This was during the second week of August. So we went and bought the new speedometer and brought it to our regular mechanic, who couldn't make it fit. They didn't know if it was because it was the wrong piece or if there was some Magic Audi Thing that they didn't know. So we took the car back and it sat around in the driveway for three weeks, until we could bring it to the Audi people.
The Audi people called the afternoon we brought the car in and said, "This speedometer's broken, we're overnighting a new one."
Then we heard nothing for over a week.
Finally I got my act together and called them a little while ago. They put me on hold for a long time, then came back and said, "Well, see, we ordered a new one, but it didn't fit either, so it's not that it was broken, it's that it was the wrong piece (which we'd suspected), and, uh, we put a call in a few days ago to ask what we were supposed to do but nobody called back so thepartsmanageriscallingthemagainrightnowokaythxbye," more or less.
This is very frustrating.
And I *really* need to find some way to be interested in my job again, because I'm getting resentful and sullen and whiny about it and it's not very nice to live with.
Sunday at SeaTac.
Sngngh. tired. very tired. tired enough that I don't know when my caps will arrive. Well, there, apparently, although I can't guaratnee they'll stay around. I'm at seatac now, stinking plane doesn't leave for another, uh. let's see. clock says 7:50 which means it's 8:50 so the plane doesn't board for 50 mnutes and leaves in about an hour and a half. v. tired. did I mention that?
am spitting distance from 60K on HoS. flight from denverwas v. productive; not so many new words, but a bunch of rearranging and editing. huh, only a couple chapters worth, i guess, but it was a lot of work. i've been mashing all sorts of chapters from different places together. was gonna try to work here at the airport, but it's much too uncomfortable, so am typing journal entries instead.
interesting point got brought up at the conference this weekend, by i think, Francine Matthews, whose websiteis probably francinematthews.com, but i'll look later. anyway, she said ther eas a big difference between editing and revising, although the words are generally used interchangeably. often used interchangeably, anyway, and i certainly use them interchangeably. how many more times do you think i can use interchangeably in this paragraph? anyway, ick, my feet are asleep. *changes positions*
anyway, editing, in her opinion, is polishing and changing words; revision is plolishing and changing structure. i think she's right. i also think that when i'm critiquing people's work i tend to critique on an editing level, not a revision level, and i think i should learn to do better with that. yah.
did i mention the tired?
uh. let's see. great weekend. *laugh* a girl named Novella (really) and I stayed up WAY too late last night (Saturday). in fact, we'd been hanging out talking and we saw her mom, who was at the conference too, wander into the ballroom where the bar had been, and we thought she'd stayed there (but it turned out she'd sensibly gone to bed), and eventually we decided it was late and headed out, and discovered we were in fact the very last people left in the whole conference area. *laugh* and this morning we discovered that we share a birthday! *laugh* so that was lots of fun, and i'll be terribly sad if she and her mom, Alexis, don't email me. snif. :)
actually, i met so many cool people that i'll be sad if many of them don't email me. :) i, oh! ran into Bob Buettner, author of ORPHANAGE, which is the book that won the contest in 2002 when I entered MANIFEST DESTINY, and catching up with him was absolutely great, because ever since i read the first five pages of his manuscript i absolutely knew he'd get published and i've been waiting and WAITING so i could read the rest of his book. it'll be out in a couple-three weeks, and i fully intend to descend upon it and snatch it up greedily.
oop, just discovered my laptop had come unplugged. blast, this battery won't even be half full again by the time it's time to board. which is all right, because it's the little one and i've got the bigger one to use still, but still. fllflbbt.
hungry, too. had the salad on the flight back, whic was less dreadful than the turkey pastrami sandwich on the way to denver, but was still pretty bad. whine. tired.
um. dammit, i want to be coherent and write up a great con, uh, writeup, but that's clearly not happening.
went to carol berg's worldbuilding thing this morning and by the time it was done i REALLY wanted to go home and work on QUEEN'S BASTARD, but i have a jillion other things to do. like finish HoS so I can start on the novella and do the necessary rewrites to TB, although i need matrice's feedback before i can really do that.
but! HoS is going well! i mean, i'm writing some stuff that even as i'm writing it i'm going "this has got to go, it doesn't move the plot any", but even so, i really seem to have gotten over the chokepoint i was at, with the whole prospect of having to do All That Revising no longer being doom-filled. yay, writing is fun. :)
which the whole weekend reinforced. :) what wonderful people, what fun and silliness and oh dear lord. *laugh*
they have a similies contest every year, in which the purpose is to write the absolute worst, or funniest, similie that you can come up with. it's rather like the Bullwyr-Lytton or however it's spelled contest.
so Saturday i went out to lunch with robin and her writing/critique partner sharon and, let's see. steven and denee, who just got married last weekend and who must be counted among some of the *nicest* people i've ever met, they were just really *nice* and fun to hang out with, and a Liz, I think, and does that make 7? no, i'm missing someone. bad me. anywya. steven has a real, i hesitate to call it a gift, for bad similie. so apparently these people have this tradition--i think they're all a critique group together--of getting together on Saturday and writing bad similies for the contest, and steven is the undisputed champion of this. this year's contest had a list of words you were supposed to use (including 'sphincter', which apparently turns up a great deal in the similie contest, out of tradition, at this point), and some notes on what a similie was. "Just because a sentence uses 'like' does not make it a similie," the rules explained, and indicated that, "Like, totally, dude," was not a similie.
So Steven, after coming up with about three other side-splittingly funny simlies, none of which I remember, said, "The dude liked totally, like, totally, dude," which made us all laugh and laugh and laugh, because it was purely nonsensical and fun to say and it even sort of worked, if you sat and struggled with it for a while.
and then we got the bright idea to sign other people's names to the similies we'd come up with. So we signed Francine Matthews' name to the "Like totally dude" similie, because she seemed like the least likely person in the entire conference to use the word 'like' in that fashion. (Francine Matthews writes the Jane Austen mystery series under the name, um, something, I forget.)
AND SHE WON.
*laugh* Came in second, actually, and in fact Alice, the president of the RMFW, approached her before the banquet dinner and asked if she'd be there, because her similie had won, and Alice had never told anybody who'd won before, but in this case she wanted to be sure Francine would be there.
And Francine, mystified, said, "I didn't write a similie...." Upon being told what 'her' similie was, she and Alice apparently dissolved into helpless laughter, at which point Sharon and Robin saw them, and according to both of them, the other one gave up the jig because they began laughing because they knew right away what was so funny that it had Francine and Alice barely able to stand up from the laughter.
But Francine, being a *great* sport, went along with it, so she got called up to the podium Saturday night and was awarded a completely awful prize (which is one of the traditions, too), and, with tears in her eyes from laughing so hard, she squeaked, "There's just one problem. I didn't write this! Someone forged my name! That's not my signature! I'm SORRY that I insulted George Bush in my talk this morning! But I want the prize!"
By this time everybody at my table (the ones responsible) were laughing so hard we could barely breathe. we'd *been* laughing so hard w could barely breathe since the similie contest *started*, because we knew what was coming. So Alice made us all come up and we all leaned on each other and laughed until we just about cried. It was so very, *very* funny. *laugh* What very, *very* silly people, and how utterly wondrful of Francie to go along with it. :)
I seem to have woken up enough to start using caps again. :) not enough to correct my typing, but enough to use caps, anyway. er, or not, I guess. Sort of. O.O :)
I'm going to have to break this into more than one entry, 'cause it's huge.
There's an award handed out every year called the Jasmine Award, presented by romance author Jasmine Creswell (who is an utterly charming lady), which honors someone who has gone above and beyond the call of duty for the RMFW organization. The recipient doesn't know he or she is getting it, and Jasmine takes great delight in building up the suspense as she tells this person's exploits and finally presents the award. When I was there in 2002, the contest coordinator, Jessie Wulf, got it, and was stunned and teary and sniffly and it was really very wonderful.
Last night they gave it to my friend Karen Duvall, who REALLY didn't expect it, because the RMFW bylaws say that people who hold administrative positions in the RMFW can't get it, and she was the published authors something liasion and thus wasn't eligible. furthermore, the other committee members had done an end-run around her and sent a tremendous number of false emails setting up someone else as the winner, and so Karen had Absolutely No Idea what was going on. And because Karen is moving out of Colorado to Oregon, they also (in order to get around the bylaws) ousted her as the PAL person and put someone else in her place so she was, in fact, eligible for the award.
She was wordless. It was wonderful. She was ALL SNIFFLY and stunned and confused and everyone was terribly, terribly pleased with themselves. I loved it. :) *laugh* She did say the first thing she thought when she realized it was her was, "OOOOH, they're gonna get in TROOOUBLE!" from Sharon, who is the person in charge of making sure the bylaws are adhered to. *laugh* But hah! They'd outsmarted her! And everybody was very happy. *beam*
The RMFW are really an amazing and terrific group of people. The conference energy is tremendous, everyone is very supportive, everyone gets very *excited* over other people's successes--I even got to talk to Joan Johnston, whose "The Power of No" speech two years ago made reading my contract much, MUCH less scary, because she talked about so many things that a beginning author just doesn't know, and so much stuff that a beginning author *needs* to know. So I got to tell her how very, very useful that was, and she congratulated me quite heartily on selling, and I got her to sign a book ('cause I'm a sucker, what can I say?) and she even wrote something to the effect of 'good luck with your Luna endeavor!' in it, so wasn't that nice of her? They're nice people there! I'm really looking forward to next year's conference. :)
And now this is the longest journal entry EVAH and I'm quite awake and the plane is boarding in 10 minutes and I think I'll take a walk around and get some water or something. Vroom.
Thursday-Saturday writeup behind the tag.
I should be, I don't know. Taking a nap, or something. It turns out the hotel doesn't have net access unless you provide your own ethernet card, which I didn't, so no actual updates, oops. O Vell. Not that there's been a whole hell of a lot of time to log on. Maybe I'll try grabbing one of the terminals at the airport tomorrow for a few minutes, or something. If there are any at the Denver airport. Anyway.
It's Saturday afternoon right now and there's stuff going on, but it's only of moderate interest to me and I thought I'd escape to the room for a while. Now that I'm here away from all the noise and stimulation I'm like zzzzSNXNKKXTzzzzzz.
I have had a very, very fine time thus far. Thursday night I went out to dinner with Robin Owens and Christie Golden, which was just tremendous fun. We believe it's the most Luna authors in one place thus far. :) They're both tiny, petite people, and there I was at 5'8" just TOWERING over them, and of course I'd only seen one picture of Christie and her hair was long and mostly straight, and now it's short and quite curly, and she had no idea at all what I looked like, and had I not seen Margie Lawson and gone over to talk to her so that when Robin showed up not long after that, heaven knows if we'd have ever managed to actually hook up. Well, we would have, because Christie and Robin know each other, and I figured I'd just wait til two short women hugged in the lobby and I'd go introduce myself to them. :)
We talked books and movies and books and some more books, and writing and books and covers--Christie showed us the cover for IN STONE'S CLASP, which is the second of her Final Dance series, and it's goooooorgeous. Robin gave me a cover flat for her book, GUARDIAN OF HONOR, which is due out in February, and it'd wonderfully elegant and restrained and goooorgous, and they're probably going to redo it entirely. Hnf. :) So we hung out for about three hours and just talked and talked, and, oh! Christie brought me a copy of her book INSTRUMENT OF FATE, which I had not previously owned, and I got her to sign both it and KING'S MAN AND THIEF, which book of hers I utterly adore. And Robin brought me a pewter crescent moon pin, 'cause we're Luna authors! And, oh, I wore the arrowhead necklace that Misty made me, and when the topic got around to her and how generous she's been with her necklaces and support of the other Luna authors, I said it was the one Misty'd made me and Christie said she'd been admiring it all night, which I thought was pretty cool. :) It was really, really fun!
Friday morning I did the one good-for-myself thing that I've done all weekend, and went down to the gym to walk a mile on the treadmill. Bah. Treadmills. I hate 'em. You don't go anywhere. Then, since I was, y'know, there and stuff, I went up to the registration area and volunteered to make myself useful, and spent the next couple hours helping out with registration bag-stuffing and the like, and talking to people and meeting people, and then yay! I discovered that Margie Rowland, whom I met at RMFW in 2002, and who was at the 2003 Writer's Weekend, was also at RMFW 2004! So we've hung out a fair bit and generally enjoyed catching up, which is very cool.
The panels and talks have not been as revolutionary to me as they were two years ago, but I've had a bloody magnificent time talking with people and some of the stuff has been very, very interesting. My absolute favorite so far was the talk called, "He said, She Thinks," which was about the differences in how men and women communicate. The one that I really loved was this:
For women, the word "fine" means the conversation is over. For men, the word "fine" means "all right" or "nice". So when a man says to a woman, "You look fine," what the woman hears is, "For God's sake, stop asking, this conversation has been shut down," while what he's really saying is, "You look nice."
Men, remember this, because it is absolutely true.
I have socialized a huge amount. Every time somebody asks Robin about Luna, she says, "You should talk to Catie!" So people *keep* coming up to me and asking about Luna, often when Robin is nearby, and I discovered this afternoon that she was in fact telling people to talk to me. *laugh* So I've talked about Luna a lot, and handed out a number of business cards (I got them! Everybody laughs when they read "C.E. Murphy, famous writer", which is exactly what they should do! *beam*), and talked about my first sale and generally lauded RMFW for providing me the kick in the pants that I needed, and I have had an absolutely bloody terrific time.
Last night there was an after-hours party in the hospitality suite, with 50 or 60 people crowded in there, and I talked to all sorts of people. Writers and agents and photographers and everybody! It was a great deal of fun, I got a lot of congratulations on selling URBAN SHAMAN and the anthology sale (Christie, on Thursday, congratulated me in person about the anthology, and said, "I'm jealous. I have *no time*, but I'm jealous," which struck me as, I don't know, a very nice thing for her to say, in a way. I mean, the anthology is a Huge Deal, so huge that *I'm* practically jealous, and hell, it's me! It was just peculiarly reassuring to hear it actually said out loud. Perhaps I'm very weird.), and let me tell you, this little yellow 'author' ribbon I get to wear on my nametag makes all kinds of people come up to talk to me. It's very cool!
By last night my back was very, very achy and I was completely exhausted. I managed to activate the chemical ice pack I'd brought with me (after a huge amount of squishing it around trying to break the inner bag to make it work) and that helped, so I was glad I'd brought those. Today I'm wearing my walking shoes instead of my clogs, which is better for me. Also, there's been less standing around, which doesn't hurt. Er. Literally, I guess. o.O
There's a panel in 10 minutes called "10 Questions You Were Afraid To Ask" and I'm trying to decide if I want to go to find out what those questions are, or if I want to take a nap. SO sleepy, at this point. And tonight, I suspect, shall run late too.
But, hey, guess what. I wrote 4000 words on Thursday. If I can do that again on the plane flight home, hell, the trip will be worth it just in wordcount! Not that it hasn't been worth it in other aspects; I'm having a blast.
Okay. Off to the panel, 'cause that'll probably wake me up again.
I don't have anything to say this morning, so con writeups, behind the cut tag to spare the lj-feed readers. Thursday morning plane ride here.
I've just had what was possibly the worst airline breakfast I've ever had. The particularly lame thing is that I upgraded to first class, and it was still inedible. Gah. I'd have rathered had one of the egg muffin things (this was some form of flavorless, but unpleasantly textured, quiche). OTOH, at least it's a hell of a lot more comfortable to /sit/ in first class.
I don't really have much to say. It's 7:30 in the morning and I've been up 3 hours, and I'm mostly writing a little journal entry to get my brain into the idea of writing. Presumably I'll post it sometime after reaching the hotel, but probably nobody really needs to know I had a really awful breakfast.
Fortunately, I bought M&Ms for when I start to be starving, later. :)
Um. I was gonna say one other thing, but I've forgotten what it was. Okay then. Going to go work on this book now, until one of three things happens: I run out of battery, I run out of brain, or we land in Seattle.
Tud.
Oh! Oh oh oh, guess what! I kept forgetting to mention this! As of last Friday, I have paid myself back for the 401K loan I took out for a down payment for the house, so that is one debt cleared! That's two so far this year, the Jeep and the 410K loan! YAAAAAAAY!
I didn't get any further on Frankenstein's Manuscript last night. Instead I called up my Mommy and talked with her for an hour, 'cause I'd been ALL ALONE ALL DAY and I was quite moopish, and besides, my head was floating with all the stuff I was trying to hold in it.
Awww, Chanti is being the CUTEST PUPPY EVAH. All sleepy wif her head on her paws and awww.
9 chapters plus however much I add. Wonder if I can get this rewrite done by Sunday evening.
My brain's tired. Holding this jigsaw together in my mind is hard. I just hit 300 pages on the rewrite, and I've got 9 more chapters of stuff that's actually written to rewrite, plus the whole other plotline I'm putting in, and while I've hit a kind of critical mass, my brain is /still/ tired. I feel like my head is floating around with all the pieces of the story as the helium to keep it up.
I didn't order pizza, though.
ytd wordcount: 231,100
miles to Lothlorien: 249
Hungry. Sleepy. Frustrated by work; a page that wasn't working turned out to be not working because it really, really doesn't have the support it needs on this site I'm developing. It didn't get speced out properly and I didn't know that, and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working, and asked Barb who got frustrated about it, and... blah.
I'm trying to decide if it would be an act of moral turpitude to order pizza for dinner. On the one hand, I'm all alone at home so I should get to eat something yummy. On the other, it's a lot cheaper to eat the leftover tuna noodle casserole. No doubt what I really should do is go for a walk, and by the time I come back I'll be too hungry to wait on pizza. And maybe I'll be more enthusiastic about the prospect of working on HoS, which I was all fired up to work on this morning, but wretched day job has sucked my will to live. Or write, anyway. Too many hours at the computer already. Bah.
I somehow turned my alarm off this morning (honestly, I didn't mean to) and didn't get up to write, but as I'm the only one home all day today (Ted's got a chef thing to do, Shaun's at his brother's wedding), I'll have time to write this evening. For hours and hours. And hours. And hours. o.o
cemurphy redesign is up and more or less functional. It's got some problems in Netscape/Mozilla that I'm trying to figure out, but not with a lot of effort. :)
Lots and lots and lots of work to get done today. Bah.
miles to Lothlorien: 244.5
Good stuff, good stuff, life is just full of good stuff. Like pot roast. We went to Mom & Dad's for dinner last night and it was really, really good pot roast and biscuits which I think we all ate too many of because there were so many kinds of very, very good homemade jam to put on them. :)
Terry Brooks is doing a book signing at Title Wave tonight, and there is a Sisters in Crime meeting at, um. Barnes & Noble. I should go to both of those things. Perhaps especially the book signing, as I have a Tragic Story about Wishsong to tell him. :)
I think I may be more or less caught up on my sleep. I hope so. I really didn't want to get up this morning when the alarm went off.
Hm. I think that's about all for right now.
miles to Lothlorien: 240
I am in SUCH a good mood! I've got backdated journal entries to upload from Little (poor Little is starting to get banged up. I did see an IBM Thinkpad at the airport yesterday that looks like it's a Little-like computer, so perhaps when poor Little falls all the way apart I'll look at something like the Thinkpad for my writing computer), but I'm finally getting caught up with email and work and everything, and I just wanted to post and dance around happily.
*dance dance dance*!
It was really a great weekend. The only person I didn't get to talk to was John Morgan from Roc, who apparently heard about me early on in the conference and wanted to meet me, but I literally only saw him once, and that was when he was handing out the award for the SF/F section of the contest. It's too bad, because I'd like to re-submit HoS to Roc after the revisions are done (and assuming Matrice passes on it a second time), and it would've been nice to make a personal connection with one of the editors at that house.
Came home to an email from Jenn saying she'd liked the proposal for OPERATION CARDINAL, the Bombshell line book/series I sent her a few weeks ago, and that she was sending it on to Matrice, so wish it luck!
I got about seven thousand words written over the weekend, astonishingly. Mostly on the airplane, and the really wonderful thing is that I've hit some kind of critical mass with HoS and broken through the drudgery of having to do major revisions, and they're now going really well. I still feel like I'm spinning plates, but I'm feeling more confident that they're all going to stay spinning. I shall charge ONWARD!
I'll post more updates later when I dig Little out from her case and get the files uploaded. :)
miles to Lothlorien: 239
ytd wordcount: 230,000
turns out the hotel didnt have easil yaccessibly email after all. iIm at the airport now, typing on a completel screwy keuboard, hence the tpos. I'll b e back for real tomorrow.
in the meantime, it' been a great weekend. :)
The first book written, you're perhaps the most well-known of the Chronicles. From Mr. Tumnus to Turkish Delight, statue people to Aslan's resurrection, there's nothing not to like here.
Find out which Chronicles of Narnia book you are.
Cool. *beam*
Okay, I'm basically off, at this point. If you want to contact me during the next four days, email me at mizkit73 AT yahoo DOT com, 'cause I can't get to my regular email when I'm on the road. I 'spect I'll post updates from the conference, but I don't know how many or how often. So, I'm off!
Ok, I think I'm all caught up on my comics and my friends and my email and everything. Whew. I also have the hiccups. Hic. Hic.
It's been a very *nice* vacation, even if it wasn't expected. We went out to the Lyse's on Sunday and then a bunch of family came in for dinner on Monday, and we played croquet until the game was declared over by Chantico, who had been VERY GOOD and kept running after the balls as we whacked them around, but didn't pick any up until I'd gotten to the final wickets and was perfectly lined up to hit the ball through the wickets and whack the pole, and THEN she picked up my ball and ran around the yard with it and wouldn't let anybody get near enough to her to take it away. *laugh* It was pretty funny. :)
Jai and I went to see Hero on Saturday, which was lots of fun. I liked it better the second time, in fact, 'cause I was prepared for the slow pacing and could enjoy it more. Oh, and we gave her the Ursula print she'd liked so much as a housewarming gift, and she was very surprised and pleased by that! So that was fun. :)
I'm closing in on 50K on the HoS rewrite, which is a complete pain in the ass. I've moved a bunch of stuff around fairly significantly and am writing in a whole new plot line, and as I told Sarah and Ted, this is sort of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong picture on the box to work from. I know what it /used/ to look like; holding in my head what it used to look like and combining that with what it needs to now look like is hard work. Both Sarah and Ted thought it was pretty funny when I said if Jenn doesn't like it better when I'm done with it, I'm going to kill myself. :)
I leave for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers conference tomorrow (and I'm dithering about whether I want to take books or the laptop on the plane with me tomorrow. Hours of enforced rewriting would probably be very good for me. OTOH, it might just make me crabby, and I don't know how the frigging TSA is about laptops these days), so I'm effectively out of work for this entire week. That doesn't suck. :) I'm having dinner tomorrow night with Luna authors Christie Golden and Robin Owens, which I think will be fun! and then will have a hopefully-inspiring conference weekend.
Let's see, what else. Walked 20 miles over my days off, and we watched the rest of season 1 MI-5 which Aberdeen had lent us, and yesterday we bought season 3 Alias and watched the first couple episodes last night. I'm doing laundry in preparation for flying away tomorrow, and...that's about it!
miles to Lothlorien: 237
ytd wordcount: 223,000
At Mom & Dad's, so posting a quick note to say, erm, well, that I'm at Mom and Dad's. :) Cable is still out, estimated time for fixing is still Wednesday between 8am and noon, I've written about 4000 words and done a fair bit of rearranging, and I think I've got a plot for the novella.
:)
Yesterday some nice men from the phone company came over and cut our cable line.
Obviously this was not what they intended, but it's certainly what they did. They buried the neighbor's phone line and in the process cut our cable line, and when I told them, they couldn't figure out where they'd cut it, although they did spend a goodly amount of time looking.
So I called the cable company and said the nice men from the phone company had cut my cable line and could they come fix it please.
Sure, the very nice man on the phone said. The first appointment time I have is for next Wednesday.
Er.
I work from home, I said. Telecommuting. This is a matter of some urgency to me.
Well, he said, he'd email his supervisors and keep an eye on the appointments and see if anything opened up or if we could be squeezed in somewhere, okay?
Well, Christ. Okay. I mean, what else am I gonna say? It's not like *I* can fix it.
So right now I'm at the Kaladi Brothers internet cafe at Title Wave, having a hot chocolate (you were right, Ted :)) and posting on my weblog so y'all don't think I died of the excitement when I don't show up for the next five days.
On the positive side, I guess this gives me a whole lot of time to gut HEART OF STONE and rewrite it the way I've been avoiding rewriting it so far. :)
You know that cool news I was talking about a couple of days ago?
This isn't it. This is wholly new, entirely different good news.
Yesterday I got email from Jenn saying she'd just spoken to Matrice (my editor), who wanted to know if I'd be interested in participating in a Luna anthology as one of three contributing authors. One of the other authors would be Mercedes Lackey, and the title of the anthology would be WINTER MOON, with the story themes revolving around the winter solstice/winter moon ideas and being otherwise appropriate for the Luna line.
Not being a great fool, I said yes.
WINTER MOON is scheduled for November 2005, and will feature a 30K novella starring Jo Walker, the main character for the Walker Paper series. This is five months after URBAN SHAMAN, the first book in the series, is due out. The timing couldn't be better for me; it's a bloody *gift*, it is.
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
*HAPPY DANCE, HAPPY DANCE*!!!!!!!! EEEEEEEEEE!
EEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!
And that's DIFFERENT good news from the stuff I'm not talking about yet! AHAHAHAHAH!
*DANCES*!!!!!
We went over to Mom and Dad's last night to have dinner (mmm, lasagna!) and to hang out and talk for a while. My cousin Alanna was in town, and there was a great deal of outrageous silliness. Ted's going to make salmon chowder on Monday when Alanna's back in town again. :) Alanna's leaving Juneau and heading for Seattle to have Adventures, yay! Lucky her! That will be fun! :) And apparently my cousin Erik's business is doing smashingly well, and yeah--life just rocks. :)
miles to Lothlorien: 217
500 eye-bleeding words this morning. I need to print this thing out and read it.
Erm. That's all.