Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Waxing Moon
Saturn Retrograde
Twelfth Night
Cloudy with the temperature dropping

So what did you dream over the Twelve Days of Christmas? It’s said that, starting with the first day of Christmas, everything you dream will come true in the month aligned with the day, i.e., first day = January, second day = February, etc. Let’s just say March and April will be hectic for me if that’s true!

Today is Twelfth Night, which means of course, the beginning of Carnivale! So the Yule decorations come down and the Mardi Gras decorations go up! To replace the Yule wreath, I made a Snowflake Wreath, consisting of a white feather boa wrapped around a wreath form decorated with silver and gold stars and snowflake ribbon. That will stay up until the Spring Equinox, when I’ll replace it with the floral wreath.

Yeah, I’m kind too into decorating. Deal. 😉

I got out six queries and one submission yesterday. I already got a response back from one of the queries, telling me they’d have a decision on my status by the 10th, another response with the information I needed to make a decision on my part, and two more responses that have brought us to points of negotiation.

Massive computer problems again (familiar refrain). Tried to keep the frustration level down to a minimum. I tried Michelle’s suggestion of disk cleanup and disk defrag, but the McAfee antivirus went nuts and things were being moved all over the place and the Blue Screen of Death alternated with the White Screen of Death and the Black Screen of Death. Everything started to beep and scream and flash. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see smoke come out of the machine, although we didn’t get quite that far. I shut everything down. I managed to get use of a friend’s computer, where I re-transcribed everything that was on tape (thank goodness I hadn’t downloaded it into the computer yet) and re-created the article. I got it off. Phew. Hopefully, my delay hasn’t caused too many problems.

Managed to keep on top of yesterday’s email and started catching up with some of the backlog.

I also went through about three years’ worth of magazines, pulled out what I wanted to keep, took the rest to recycling – which took four trips. I’m a magazine junkie; I’ve let several subscriptions lapse because the magazines are no longer really relevant to my life and some of the writing’s gotten so bad that I can’t bear to read them anymore. I knew I had to cut back on some subscriptions because of economics; one of the biggest factors is the quality of the writing. Those magazines whose quality has declined – not renewing. I discovered that I missed one magazine whose subscription I let lapse a little over a year ago. I might buy a current issue or two to see if it’s worth it again.

In any case, I pulled out what I wanted, put the pages into sheet protectors, and put the protected sheets into binders. Four loads of magazines wound up in about 75 protectors, usually two sheets to a protector, so out of all those magazines, I only really needed 150 pages. Interesting.

And now I have the information that I need easily accessible, instead of hunting through a whole year or more worth of magazines.

Good morning’s work on the Billy Root story. I have so much fun in that world that it’s hard to stop. The natural daily rhythm for the piece seems to be around 1200-1400 words, which is nice. My deadline’s not yet too tight for it, more like “get it done” rather than “get it done by X date”, so I can let it take its natural rhythm, and, as long as I keep a steady pace, I should finish the first draft in early March, which is fine – have Book 3 ready just as Book 2 releases.

I ran a few errands, and now I can hunker in during the bad ice storm that’s expected tonight into tomorrow, take down the decorations, bake some bread, and figure out which of next priorities on the project list is the biggest priority. I think I’ll get back to the rewrite of THE MATILDA MURDERS tomorrow.

Off to tackle the tree, and then, it’s back to the page, and to my negotiations. I’d like to land one or two of those jobs.

Devon

Billy Root story – 5,663 words out of est. 60,000

5 / 60 (8.3%)