I'm so freaked I can't even blog.

Sigh.

So, we're home from the soccer tournament. I do have writing news, but first, I wish to mention that among the many bad things to happen this weekend (overshadowed for a time by the contact lense incident) was that on Saturday AM as I was getting stuff out of the trunk of my car, the trunk came down and smacked me on the bridge of the nose. It really hurt at the time. But no blood or anything so whatever, right? Except by Saturday eve it still really, really hurt. Like a lot. And Sunday morning I woke up with a killer headache. I actually stayed up late and got up early to work on the laptop. I got more done in less time with the use of two eyes, which was good. I had tea with breakfast - no help for the headache which remained persistent and painful and I thought it was caffeine deprivation, but it didn't go away even after a quad cappucino (4 shots being necessary because it was an off-the freeway place that I just knew didn't really know how to make espresso and I was right. 4 shots made it just barely past a normal cap.) The headache didn't go away. Odd, thought I, and kind of annoying. Basically, about an hour ago, I finally realized the headache is due to getting smacked on the nose very hard. That whole part of my head hurts.

Moving right along. I printed off all the chapters for The Rake and brought them with me on my soccer adventure. So, at some point I was working on chapter one - in the afternoon, between games and before the dread contact lense incident and flash it occurs to me that I need to make my heroine the sister of my hero's best friend. And, here's the funny part for any writer who read this far (note: in one small hotel room, there are two adults and 4 children, 3 of which are noisy, high-engery 10-11 yo boys - all parents of similar boys will understand what this means to the level of noise)

So, I'm sitting there, staring into space mentally tracking through the implications and mentally tracking all the necessary adjustments to heft of the story, and making sure that this change will work BEFORE I start ripping things to shreds, the other mother looks at me and says, something along the lines of "Is something wrong? Are you all right?" Because as I was experiencing the excitement of having stumbled upon a brilliant change while that same time realizing there were darlings to cut, my expression is apparently worrisome to those who are not writers. I believe she thought I was either psychotic or having some sort of attack.

So, that was my weekend. My head hurts. Ouch. I have to wear my dorky glasses, which I hate because I don't see as well (no peripheral vision, to start with). Plus, I have pristine printed pages of The Rake and I never even got past page 1 for crying out out, and now there's no point in reading them because it's all going to change. No tree saving here. But all things considered, I'm thrilled, thrilled thrilled with my adjustment because now I know what to do with the middle and back 4th of the story, which I was getting worried about.

So, here I am in lovely Burlingame, and my contact lense has ripped in half. Did I bring my glasses? No, I did not. FYI, my vision is less than 20/400 (it's so bad they don't bother to calculate it out all the way. I am legally blind, basically, w/o glasses or contacts.) My cell phone is dead. Why? I have no idea. It was fully charged just yesterday. So I don't have anyone's phone number. No one at home is answering the phone. I called information and got my brother's number, but I got the babysitter and she said he didn't leave a cell number. So, my sister can't leave work. Finally someone at home answered and I got my other brother's number. So the good news is that Matathew will go home and get my glasses, a contact lense case and my phone charger and meet the other parent on the other side of the Golden Gate bridge from Burlingame. So, I owe huge favors to her and my brother. I'm not in a happy place, well, happier now than I was. But I'm typing with one eye closed. The kids are building a fort.

On another bright note, I had a really great idea about The Rake which involved rewriting a lot of the beginning but it will be worth it. It will eliminate a character, which is good. So. Sigh..

I'm here in lovely Burlingame CA in between soccer games. We'll leave in a bit for the last game. I have the MS for The Rake with me, and I'm going to work on that now. I feel like I ought to surf the net just because I have broadband access here at the hotel... But I won't. I'm going to work and tune out 3 hyped up boys...

Let's see. I'm tired. Taught my first class at SSU last night. They're juniors and seniors plus creative writing majors, so it's a good group, a great group. When I've TA'd in the past, it's been for lower division courses and most of the students were there because they had to be. My students all had really interesting ideas for projects and it was clear that many are already deep into their stories. So, I think this class will be fun. Who will be the brilliant one, whose story takes your breath? I know I'll be surprised. The first writing class I ever took, it was a UC Extension course, I never turned in a thing. The thought of letting anyone see my work paralyzed me. And there was a brilliant, brilliant writer. Prize winning quality (Howard Ockman, where are you?) But, I sold my first novel less than a year later. The class was short story writing and novel writing is vastly different. But I was in class every week, reading and absorbing everyone else's work, and that was good for me.

I'm taking the reading survey class for the oral exam this semester so I have a lot of reading to do. The reading list is different than the one I saw earlier. This one has even more stuff I've already read so most of my reading will be review and refresh. There's an advantage to being old. But also, I took both halves of the British Lit survey before I applied to the MA program and everything in the Brit Lit section I've already read. I'm re-reading the Canterbury Tales now. Fun.

I've been plugging away on The Rake. I was reading it today, I think it was good. Uh oh. I may be close to sending it out to a few people to read. Then to my agent. I've been developing my dark elf idea on the sly.

Tomorrow my son has a soccer tournament, Saturday and Sunday. I'm driving down with one of the other parents. I guess I'll do school reading in the car. We may spend the night because the last game is kind of late. And, I'm thinking maybe that wouldn't be bad because my son will be entertained by the other kids and I can hunch over the laptop and get some writing done.

This afternoon, my son and I attended a birthday party for my sister's cat, Whiskers, AKA Nightmare. Interestingly enough, a lot of people came. None of them had ever been to a party for a cat before. Nightmare got lots of presents. Someone brought her tuna. Not tunafish, actual tuna. My cats got her a nice card and some kitty treats (because they don't have a big allowance.) It was fun.

blogging news

So, Wed Aug 24, Liz Maverick will be guest blogging in this very space! Yay. If we're lucky, she'll talk about the The Bikini Wax and tell us about Part II.

sighting news

Today, I went grocery shopping. The grocery story has a relatively decent book section. They even have Dorchester books. I've been watching for Crimson City books. And today they had Liz's Crimson City! That was really exciting. I confess, I stuck A Darker Crimson bookmarks in the copies.

writing news

Um... I did a little work today. Am going back to do more, I swear.

So, the page proofs are done, all packed up and ready to overnight on whatever day I am near a post office. Now, I can focus on The Rake and Shift and my dark elf, and finish that gosh darned Sleath paper which is a complete draft instead of a partial! Anyhoo. The wooden stakes are also in a box and addressed. I thought I'd be sore today but I'm not. I ate five cookies so the guilt level is pretty high. But they were really good. I think that craving for fat is an indication of stress for me. Gee, am I stressed? It's not like I thought ADC was boring and horrible or anything like that. I keep thinking, people (who aren't me) said it was really good. CK seemed to think I did a great job, those were his words. Everyone except CK could have been lying to protect my feelings, but it's possible that at the end of the revision stage, it was then not in his interest anymore to not to lie. Ok, double negative there. So sue me. After all, by then, it was too late to send me back for more. Right? Sigh. It's not what I hoped. At all.

My son starts school Wednesday (I start Thursday) and I had to take him shopping for new soccer shoes because he's grown out of and worn through the other pair and he has a two-day tournament this weekend. Then I had to get him school clothes. Usually he is really picky, but we were able to find 12 slims and tee-shirts he liked, plus black socks. Then we had to get a new bedspread for him because his is falling apart. Then I had to get the box for the wooden vampire stakes and an envelope to mail the page proofs, and then wash all the new stuff, feed him, finish the page proofs. etc.

Plus my best friend and college roommate is in San Francisco from Denver and so I'm going to SFO tomorrow night, leaving straight from soccer. I stayed up until midnight last night because I didn't want to admit the day was over, so it took extra espresso to keep me awake today. And, some personally identifying information was on a Sonoma State U computer that got hacked, so I had to do the credit protection dance and the people on the phone had the NERVE to lecture me about phishing and using a firewall and antivirus. Perhaps I interrupted before they got to patching, but then maybe he was just a freaking idiot. Anyway I told the fine gentleman on the phone, maybe not very nicely at one point, that he needed to lecture SSU, not me. Which brings me around to this - I have another grad school application to consider, which, interestingly enough, is for infoSec. They want 3 letters of recommendation and right there on the form for the letters is a big space for my SSN. So, let's see, supposedly the school that FBI and police attend for Computer InfoSec uses SSN to track their students. This is STUPID And then, they think it's fine to expose my SSN to whoever happends to handle my letters of recommendation. Well, gee. I think I know problem number one with U.S. government infosec.

Umm, so maybe I got a wee bit off track there. I could keep complaining, but actually, I'm excited to see Jen, it's been years!

The galleys for A Darker Crimson came Tuesday or maybe it was Monday, it's kind of a blur. Whoever made sense of Chris's changes and my changes must be some kind of genius puzzle solver. Probably he or she is at home recovering from a severe case of eye-strain. Anyway, I've been through the first pass, will make another soon. I'd like to get this in the mail tomorrow, otherwise, it'll have to be Monday.

In other news, this afternoon I made wooden stakes. For killing rogue vampires. (Why? what were you thinking?) I meandered down to the creek in search of suitable wood. Found some, but the better wood was already in the burn pile. For those of you who aren't familiar with the phrase, here in Sonoma County where summer = no rain whatsoever, the grass is extremely dry. So no fireworks in the country and no fires outside either. So, if you want to burn agricultural waste - like branches left over after pruning etc, you have to wait for winter and then get a permit. So everyone has a big old pile of branches, etc waiting to be burned come winter. Also, I saw an interesting branch in the neighbor's field, so I made my son go get it. Anyway, turns out no one knows where any of the 2-3 axes are, and maybe that's just as well because probably I would have hurt myself. I found two rusty saws and one of them cut well enough. But there's there's 3-D spatial thing you need going for you to get to a pointy end on a stake, and a big rusty saw makes that kind of hard. But I found a rasp and that did the pointy-end trick once I got the rough cut. So, anybody who thought angry villagers or vampire hunters had it easy going out to get wooden stakes is just wrong, I am here to tell you that right now.

Nothing else is going on. Life is dull and boring. But I have all my fingers and given my stake experience, that's good.

Yesterday was the last day of "Programming SQL Server 2000". I took my son out to a Let's get reacquainted dinner on Thursday, and then Friday rushed out of the class to catch an early bus because he wanted to see Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory. So, I caught a bus 45 minutes earlier than the usual one and got home 15 minutes early. Commute traffic sucks. Plus, I was just unable to continue reading the medieval romance. Loved the hero, but the heroine a) possessed a 21st century outlook on the roles of women and men (Dear authors, please read some non-fiction by people with PhD after their names, you'd be surprised how different some things were 500 years ago...) b) was supposedly inexperienced in sexual matters but expressed no curiosity or trepidation - hey, who cares if it's 1300 AD (I'm disguising the year) -- virginity is a disease, right? Whew! What a relief the hero got rid of that problem for her! c) was a complete and utter idiot d) blamed the hero for things no sane person would blame him for e) did not blame the hero for lying to her. That poor poor hero. OK, now where was I?

Right. So, since I was stuck on the bus, I brainstormed more on the elf story (hmm, seems like I might actually write a damn elf story... There will be NO happy elves, my elf will be dark and maybe live in a slightly twisted culture.) made some good progress, got home, tossed the wretched medieval in the garbage (hard) changed and went to the movies. What a weird movie. I enjoyed it and so did my son. Best line of the movie? When Willy is telling Charlie he'll have to leave his family behind in order to take over the factory: "Consider that a bonus!" I wish there was html to render Depp's expression and tone.

Today, I went to my local RWA chapter meeting, came home and made my son go to a quilt show with me and my sister. The quilts are on display all over town and in the park, so it's possible to do some shopping etc. For a while, he was transformed into a teenager. Sullen and pouting. But then he got over it and a good time was had by all. My sister is not tall, about 5'2" and my 10 year old kid is up to her eyeballs. How did that happen?

Tomorrow we're going to the Renaissance Faire. So, this will be an unproductive weekend writing-wise. I'm desperate to read a good romance, but I've had 3 clunkers in a row. Two of them I couldn't even finish.

So for anyone who read this far - you've reached the neurotic bonus section. I think the reason I'm not really getting all that much writing done is I'm afraid that I'll screw up. If I actually send a proposal to the house that wants me, which is not a small one, the editor might reject it and then I'm screwed. Sigh.

So here I am, stuck in SFO, in a MS SQL Server course having my brain stuffed with more technology. Since I'm taking the bus to and from the city, I have time to read. The last 3 books were not very good. Bad, in fact. I don't think I can force myself to finish the one I have now. This is disappointing. The historical I'm trying to read now is a medieval and oh, dear. Horrible. Sigh. Off to query optimization.

No, not friends visiting, at least not in the physical sense. But I am attending an MCDBA class in the city (San Francisco) so I'm taking the bus there and back since I refuse to drive in commute traffic. Anyway, I'm experiencing this strange sort of split personality snycope. Usually I can compartmentalize DBA stuff and writing stuff, but not right now. Strange. Oh, back to the lab... More later, but it's unclear who will be posting. (bwahahahaha). The Rake is coming along nicely. I'll get the chapters out to read and to my agent and see. Then back to Shift and then working up the elf thing. Plus that other historical I was thinking about.

You know what annoys me about blogger? Alt+S means publish. In Word Perfect (and Word) Alt+S means Save. As a paranoid neurotic writer, how many times do you think I hit Alt+S to save what I've just done? Yup. About a bazillion times a minute. So that last post wasn't quite done. Too bad. I'm too tired to fix it.

I had to be at work at 5am this morning. I'm tired. Sleepy. Anyway, I finished most of my syllabus for the class I'm teaching. Sleath is the next project to finish up. I last left it in an OK draft state. Have been working on the proposal for The Rake which needs to get done. Completely new chapter 1. Then I need to finish the proposal for Shift. And then decide if --- OK, full stop. I jokingly told Chris Keelsar I'd do an elf story for him. Not long after that, my hero elf just popped into my head. Honestly. All of a sudden, there he was saying, "Hey! Here I am. And here's my culture, too. Now you have to write about me." I think he's right. Oh, geez, it's 6:00. I need to figure out what to feed my son for dinner.

What a strange and stressful week. I'm not quite recovered sleep-wise from my ADC revision sleep deprivation combined with RWA Nationals. But here's the thing, some really good things happened at Nationals (I'm working hard on enjoying the moment and not stressing over following up on good things...) I told a couple of fellow-writers and they got it immediately. That made me feel good. But when I got home, nobody got it. The response was a blank look. One person at work got it, but he's a former libriarian and runs a book shop (he's a part timer, transitioning into his book store.) So, he understood the big deal part. Nobody else. My sister took my son to the movies last night. Ah hah! I thought. I'll get a lot of writing done. I fell asleep.