6 January 2004

You know how I said I got eight rejections yesterday? Heh. Well. Funny thing about that.

Make it nine.

All you people are required to be nice to me today, all right?

And do I win the virtuous writer-girl prize for the day? I do, and do you want to know why? Because I found another market for every damn one of those stories last night. I am such a virtuous writer-girl, it is not even funny. I did not decide to become a nuclear physicist or a pastry chef or a hermit or any of a number of other totally reasonable options. I got right back out there again right away.

Because I am insane, apparently.

My parents have some friends who have a kid. Well, my parents have lots of friends who have at least one kid. The one I'm thinking about in specific is Jenna, though, who is a college freshman who writes. I just wrote her an e-mail, because she wanted to talk about writing and for whatever reason hadn't been able to get through to the e-mail her mom passed along for me. I've known Jenna since she was bitty. Since I could pick her up and haul her around comfortably at our daddies' softball games. And right now, I want to holler out, "Oh, Lordy, girl, don't do it! Ruuuuuun! You're still young! There's still a chance for you!" (Only I fear there isn't. She's 18 or 19 by now, as a college freshman. By then, I was sunk.)

Hardest life in the world? Oh, heavens, no. I haven't had to intubate any small people lately. I know it could be much, much worse than the life I've chosen for myself. But it just feels ridiculous at this point. NINE. It's, it's rejections at ludicrous speed. I have gone to plaid.

So far plaid, in fact, that last night I finished the short-short called "The Patient Geometers," just so that I could have another story to send out in the mailing orgy today. And sat and pondered whether I could do another, just in case, just for fun. But no; ten stories out today is enough, unless another gets rejected, in which case...yeah.

Not just masochistic, but also belligerent.

(Rachel told me once that her little nephew was fond of being belligerent but, at the age of 3 or so, got it wrong: "Do you wanna piece of meat? Do you wanna piece of meat?" And so I can't hear it any other way in my head.)

Also, I hit the word goal for the Not The Moose Book, got some good work done on "Docile Bodies," and figured out some stuff about the books that follow Dwarf's Blood Mead. After all the rejections, not before. Writers: that very special breed of people who just can't take a hint.

And apparently can't do anything else useful: I started scrolling up through my "to do" list for this week and gulped, because there was a lot of it above the "send out ______ to _______" items I added yesterday. I got lots of writing stuff done. Other stuff? Er...what other stuff?

Well, other stuff will have to get addressed today, because I have a chiropractor's appointment, but more importantly on one of the coldest days of the year, the heater isn't working. It hasn't cut out entirely. It just isn't keeping the main floor warm enough. It keeps cutting out after it warms up a few degrees, and the display says "Hold -AC" for reasons we do not understand. This is not good. We fear that the blower may have gone kaput.

I'm sure on a day when the temperature is struggling to get above 0 F, the heating repair folks will have nothing else to do. Right?

At least we have a warranty and a bunch of computers and warm beds. (Timprov's waterbed is heated, and Mark and I got a dual-control electric mattress pad for Christmas.) The upstairs is still fairly warm if we keep the doors to the various rooms shut so that the cold air doesn't waft in.

Mark is still quite sick. He was coughing for much of the night, although I managed to sleep through some of it. He had -- as predicted -- attempted to claim that he was doing better. We're not believing it.

And his computer -- through which our connectivity goes -- is misbehaving. It crashed twice in ten minutes just now. Wheeeeee. Perhaps it will behave now. And perhaps the furnace will spring forth fully functional any minute now.

Perhaps. Right.

I made Mark take me out for dinner last night (because, dude, nine!), and the moral of the story is that layered crepes are not lasagna. Occasionally tasty. But not lasagna. Also, something gave me stomach cramps in the middle of the night. In my dream, it was because I had to mold a Klein bottle of a plot point out of my own body to give to Bear. You know, now that I'm awake that sounds creepy and gross, making Klein bottles of my own flesh for someone else to use as plot points. (Obviously not creepy and gross if it was my own plot point....) This is, you see, perhaps not the best week that ever there was.

The credit card people are keeping an eye on our charges, and so are we, but they are less worried than perhaps they might be, because the expiration date doesn't appear on the statement. So all the people who may have seen the statement when it was floating around the mails open still couldn't give the information needed to order on, say, Amazon. We hope.

We'll just check things very carefully. They've flagged our account. It should be fine. We hope.

I'm showered and dressed, and we have the heater guy coming by two. My ski sweater is pulling funny at the shoulders, like I need to hold my hands out all the time, and I don't think a three-quarter sleeve shirt is enough to go under it without me going mad itching. Hmm. We'll have to examine the cold weather wardrobe and see what's still needed now that Christmas is past. A couple of waffle-weave shirts, I think, for under sweaters on days like today. Target specials will do. Anyway, let the addressing and the stamping begin.

Uff da mai.