In Which Public And Interesting Don't Coincide Well

4 April 2003

Guess what we have. No, guess. It's amazing, stupendous, everything I always dreamed of. It's a newspaper. Delivered to our doorstep, wrapped in plastic to keep the rain out, in a relatively timely fashion. Wow.

And it really is Ed's birthday today, or so my calendar claims. For the third day in a row, or so my subconscious claims.

No recommendations of expat lit so far. Maybe those of you who know that kind of thing haven't read yesterday's entry yet. Dunno.

Anyway, I finished the Gopnik book -- was that yesterday? It feels like it was a week ago. And I started Karl Schroeder's Permanence, which is fine so far, but I liked Ventus better. So far, I feel like he's just missing a bit. Still a decently interesting book to read. Just...not quite what I was hoping for. Maybe it will be better later on in the book. I don't know.

I made a cucumber/chicken/ramen salad with a peanutty dressing last night. Meh. Could have been much better. But there's lots of it, so we'll have the chance to dribble on more chili oil or whatever we can think of, I guess. We have way too many leftovers. Makes dinner an easy call, though. I have to go to the store despite that, because I'm going to make spinach and artichoke dip for tomorrow night's potluck (we got assigned appetizers), and I have neither spinach nor artichoke hearts. Nor cheese of the appropriate kind. Nor fresh rosemary nor small envelopes, but those don't have anything to do with the potluck.

When we have a place to keep it, I'm going to grow my own rosemary.

My to-do list has gotten pared down to things that I need to do often (cleaning the bathroom, for example) and long-term things (working on the Not The Moose Book), with only a handful of short-term projects. It's a strange feeling. It's not exactly less stressful, because the all-the-time and long-term stuff is still there, and there's still a lot of it. But it's almost -- I don't know, a rush of perspective, maybe. There's a little bit of wiggle room to it. A little bit of flexibility -- I still have stuff to do a lot of the time, but I have more choice in when I do it. Sort of. Maybe.

I don't expect it to last. Sooner or later, we'll know what we're doing for next year, and then I'll have all kinds of things that need doing yesterday if not sooner. And I'll talk to people who have interesting things to say, and Mark will talk to people who have interesting things to say. And I suppose Timprov will, too, since Mark and I generally have interesting things to say to him. But I don't feel I should be more specific than that until later. Sorry.

Speaking of interesting things, I worked on two cool unfinished novel projects yesterday. One was the Not The Moose -- woo, go Not The Moose! -- and the other is a collab with Timprov. It's not the usual kind of collab where I write a bit and he writes a bit, though. Mostly what he's doing for it is architectural design. The good part: it doesn't require me to start writing this book right away. He can do the design parts first, in as much advance as he likes. And we're both having a great time with it, which is what I think collabs are for.

I'm sorry I've gotten boring. We're all moping and brooding and waiting around here. Sending out rejected stories, renewing my Analog subscription. Reading. Reading the paper. Working. Cleaning. There's a lot of stuff, it's just that the public is not interesting and the interesting is not public. Again. Sorry. I promise it won't always be like this.

It had better not be.

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