Ok, my Comic Con schedule is starting to take shape. Currently it looks something like this:

WEDNESDAY, JULY 22:
Daytime is free, with a potential lunch with (of all things) a friend from Ireland :)
Evening is Preview Night. Expect incoherency from the chick who’s flown over from Ireland.

THURSDAY, JULY 23:
Evening: Random House party (that sounds totally different than what it actually is! *laughs*)

FRIDAY, JULY 25
1:00-2:00
Looking at our World: Eye on the Present
Authors discuss how they use the supernatural in stories of contemporary society: Kelley Armstrong (Women of the Otherworld), LA Banks (The Vampire Huntress Legend Series), Kate Brallier (The Boundless Deep), Marjorie M. Liu (The Iron Hunt), C.E. Murphy (The Negotiator Trilogy), Justine Musk (Lord of Bones), Lilith Saintcrow (The Dante Valentine Series), and moderator Samantha Sommersby (Forbidden: The Revolution).

2:00-3:00
Looking at our World: Eye on the Present panelists autographing in the Comic-Con Autograph Area

SATURDAY, JULY 26:
11:00: LUNA-sponsored book signing. HOUSE OF CARDS will be available. Other books should perhaps be purchased ahead of time and brought for signing. :)

SUNDAY, JULY 27:
12:30ish: Lunch with /Goth_Huntress

still unscheduled:
“Carpe food” with my editor (her phrasing, not mine. *snickers*)
catching up/eating with JG
catching up/eating with Jim/Cam, which I EXPECT TO HEAR FROM CAM ABOUT, SIR o.o
hopefully some kind of CBLDF thing
hopefully some time at the Dabel Bros booth
time at the Del Rey booth to do a video interview

currently: excited

Came down to Cork yesterday. Met a nice American couple on the train and chatted with them all the way, thus ensuring I wouldn’t get any work done. Current wordcount: 2000 words behind schedule.

Ted has done a massive job of packing up. There is no living room, there are only boxes. The bedroom is by and large a mass of suitcases. The kitchen is…actually, right now it looks like a disaster area, but it’s the sort of disaster area that, with about an hour’s work, will be entirely packed up. I’m going to do that today. That, and take the art down and spackle in the holes we’ve left in the walls.

I also need to upload the last two weeks’ worth of Project365 pictures. I’m torn on whether to use a photo from the Eric Clapton concert last night or the great shot I took of a redhead on the LUAS for yesterday’s photo… (eta: I’m an idiot. I only brought one camera down with me. Most of the Project365 photos are on the *other* one…)

The concert was great. It wasn’t the best I’ve been to, in part because I don’t know Clapton’s music (I knew two songs, and one of them only sort-of), but man that guy can play a guitar. He looks like he’s just somebody’s dad, but man, he can play a guitar. :) We had a very good time. :)

And now I’m either sicker than a dog or badly affected by the dust and stuff in the air here, which reminds me I should take allergy medicine in case it’s that and not illness, but I’ve also got two canker sores (side by side, the little bastards), which is often an indication of illness in me. Of course, it’s also an indication of stress. Anyway. I need to take a shower, leave the house to get something to eat, buy spackle, come back, pack the kitchen, take the art down, fill in holes in the walls, and…do laundry. I’m not getting /any/ writing done this weekend, am I? Well, that’s why I figured if I got another 10K done by Thursday next I’d be doing really well. Oh well.

Onward.

currently: determined

really. no holds barred. *really* have to get these thinks done today:

- send proof of professional creator status to SDCC
- respond to matrice
- respond to *barbara*, for god’s sake
- at *least* three chapters of TPC edits. preferably more like, oh, say, TEN

less important but also still really need doing:

- ask dabels for sdcc thing
- finish neal’s interview questions
- finish gareth’s interview questions
- write blog request #1
- write blog request #2

(very oddly, in the last ten days i’ve been asked to do six different guest blog/interview things. i feel all popular!)

bonus:

- go see Iron Man

(Guess which of the things on this list *will*, without any question, happen…)

currently: busy

Ursula has such a way with words.

Normally, under any sane circumstances, 2300 or so words a day would be a totally respectable wordcount. But to get this book done this week, I need to be doing 5K. I went to Ursula and whimpered. She said, “Ah. So the problem is that you’re doing mere superhuman productivity instead of Blazing Avatar of the Writing Godhead productivity?”

I knew she’d understand.

ytd wordcount: 150,600
miles to Minas Tirith: 264.9

currently: amused

I had a dream a couple of nights ago, the only bits of which I remember were 1. standing amongst literally thousands of fallen books (specifically SF/F books. I recognized cover art), trying to slog my way…well, to the bathroom, I think, because now that I think about it a lot of my dreams were revolving around going to the bathroom, thanks to an over-full bladder. But anyway, staggering and slipping on books, trying to work my way through them. When I woke up I thought, well, *that* didn’t need much interpreptation, did it. :)

The other bit I remember was having a rather soft silky but unquestionably present mustache, about which I was not happy, and especially not happy that no one had *mentioned* to me that I’d grown a mustache. According to the intarwebs, a woman dreaming she has a mustache “indicates that you are expressing your power through your words and your verbal expression.”

Now I’m amused. :)

This has been a very busy week. Some highlights:

* I’ve been invited to be a workshop teacher at a writer’s conference in South Carolina this October. I’ll post more about that when I have more details, but it looks like a really exciting, intense weekend, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s also the weekend before WFC, so we’re thinking we might just go Stateside and stay there a few weeks like we did last year.

* I’ve arranged a bonanza signing at the Forbidden Planet in London, tentatively scheduled for 20 September. The entire Negotiator trilogy will be out by then, as well as THE QUEEN’S BASTARD, and of course all the Walker Papers that are currently available. There should also be three issues of Chance out at that point, so, yeah: a bonanza signing event. More as I know it on that, too.

* Question from comments: The inside of HoC advertises HoF as coming in September 2008. Has that been officially changed, or was August only tentative? Answer: I just couldn’t remember when it was coming out, and kept thinking it was August. It’s September. :)

* HOUSE OF CARDS is out! Officially it’s out on Tuesday, but numerous people have reported seeing it in the bookstores! Quick! Go forth! Buy it! Get me onto a bestseller list! *hopeful eyes* :)

* Lots of Chance news:
» After discussion, the Dabels and I have decided to postpone the TAKE A CHANCE launch until July. The May schedule was a leetle too ambitious to give the comic the lead-up and promotion we all think it deserves, so we decided to give it a proper launch at San Diego Comic Con. Now I just have to figure out how to get there myself. *passes the hat*

» Chance #1 is in the can. I’ll be checking over the pages one last time today and then uploading the files for the Dabels. One down, forty-seven to go!

» I have lined up a totally spectacular cover artist for issues 2-5. I’ll do announcements as to who later, once we’ve gotten contracts and everything ironed out, but Marvel fans from the 90s will recognize his work, if not necessarily his name. I’m incredibly thrilled. :)

» I’ve found a new artist for Chance! This has been a long process with a lot of very talented artists auditioning for the job, but to my delight I’m actually going to be working with a guy I talked to…three years ago now? Wow. When I did my initial search for an artist. Aleksandar Sotirovski is a Macedonian artist with a fantastic portfolio and a lot of professional credit, particularly in Europe, and I think his Chance is going to be just as sexy and fantastic as Ardian’s, but with Aleksandar’s own twist on her. Here’s the rough draft character sketch he sent me a few weeks ago:

We’ll be getting started on the first of Aleksandar’s issues in April, probably, and start really hitting the ground in around July–after I’m done with these last couple books I’ve got due.

» It also looks like some of my Ambitious Plans regarding Chance may well come to fruition. I will, once again, keep people posted as I know more, but I’m pretty excited about the prospects.

Overall, I’m really pleased with where things stand with Chance. It’s honestly a huge relief for all of us that the comic’s not going to launch until July, and between that and having found an artist, wow, walking on air here. It’s a big burden off my back for a while, and I’m very glad about that.

* My hand is healing up. I’m even kind of using it to type today. I think as long as I remain sensible over the weekend I should be back at work Monday. Whew.

* And last, though hardly least, Ted is smashingly handsome in pinstripes:

(more smashingness here and here!)

currently: busy

Ever have those dreams where an entire book downloads into your head at once and you know you’re dreaming and you actually think, “Oh, god, the whole book just downloaded,” but you know you’re not going to be able to hold on to it so you’re frantically trying to write it down except you’re trying to write it in the dream and the words keep changing so dammit you at least try to *dream* it really solidly so maybe some of it will stick and all you wake up with is an awareness that you’ve had a fantastic dystopian near-future SF dream that seems to be the result of a cross between the Age of Apocalypse and GWB’s America and that because you dreampt it you know it’s there in your brain *somewhere* but you don’t know that you’re ever going to get it out again?

Or is that just me?

On the positive side, I got more than a thousand words written on TPC before 9:30. Back to work now.

currently: crushed

My life is a series of ongoing Thinks To Do lists, apparently. Though at some point here it seems like I ought to reach a tipping point and should stop needing to make them because I’ll have the bulk of the work done and it’ll just be lightness and puppies and flowers from there on out.

- write 1000 words
- respond to some artists
- get FTP stuff set up & email the team with those details
- see if K8 wants to go listen to trad music on friday
- go to the gym
- do some shopping (dryer sheets, something made entirely of vegetables for dinner, freezable storage unit for remaining RB&R, berries of some sort)
- laundry

When do we get to the lightness and puppies and flowers?

*laughs* Via chat conversation with natural20:

natural20: Go, write.
mizkit: Oh all right. :)
natural20: It’s good for you.
mizkit: builds character?
natural20: Well, by definition, yes. :)

I am now cheerful enough to go write. :)

currently: busy

I never did get started today. Napping ended in dreams of people asking me about project after project I was supposed to be working on but had never heard of. Ted took me out of the house and we walked down to the Blackpool farmers’ market, which wasn’t worth walking down to because it’s new, off-season, and not well-populated, but was worth it because it was a beautiful day and it got me out of the house for quite a while. And we discovered the DIY store down at the shopping centre has cheap wellies and heavy-duty rakes, both of which are necessary for tackling the back garden, so that’s all good too. And we walked back into the city to buy food for dinner, and generally had a nice day out, and then watched Hellboy this evening. (I love that movie.) So in the end it was a good day.

On the work front, I at least managed to get several emails out and several artists responded to. I think this time I’m getting a generally higher quality of artwork, which is neat. I’ve yet to see anybody whose work has made me go “!” the way Ardian’s initial portfolio did, but I have great hopes for some of the people I’ve requested a test page or two from. So we shall see. Also, one of the artists today is actually a fan of mine, and while she’s doing manga-style art (and emailed to ask if she should submit because my stupid *ad* had a *typo* in it) that’s wrong for the project, we had a fun little chat and she wanted to know when Alban and Margrit were getting together. *laugh* So that was cool. :)

I have a Lucy-cat on my lap and purring at me. And sneezing on me. The one is cuter than the other. Anyway, I take it all as an indication I should go to bed, and so now I do.

miles to Minas Tirith: 18.4

currently: stressed