sunday airport report

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.