14 May 2003

I woke to find the cable modem down. Sigh. But it popped right back up again, and I found out that my short story, Prototype, is available from Fictionwise and Far Sector. (I'm not entirely sure what the deal is with Far Sector's layout...ah well, we'll figure it out.) Sixty-eight cents, people -- that's not too bad for a short story. (And I do get royalties.) It's about AIs. It was originally called "Angels Ever Bright and Fair," but then I went and removed all the extraneous opera singing from it. And now the opera-free version is available for your very own enjoyment. So enjoy already. I did my part here. The rest is up to you.

I slept hard and well last night, a firm eight hours, and as a result, I am no longer zombiefied. I'm not quite at my brightest-eyed morning-glory stage, but I am safe to be put in charge of power tools now. Should that issue come up.

I was saying in another context yesterday that the nice thing about writing novels is that you know what you need to do. It's not like if I was having a zombie day and writing only short stories. Then I would have had to flail around figuring out what short story to do next, where to start, whether I could be trusted to edit, whether it was done or just waiting for the next round. With a novel, I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and I could sit down and do it, and if I have to line-edit that part more strenuously than usual, or if some phrases took a little longer to come up with than they should have, well, that's all right.

I don't think I realized how much this worked in my favor when I was in grad school and writing Fortress. I was thinking it was a bad thing that I wasn't getting short stories out, that I wasn't popping up immediately with the Asimov Award and getting editor-people to know/remember me. And it wasn't a great thing, but I really don't think it was a career-killing move, either. Writing a novel was a better idea than wandering through a story or two and spending all my time trying to figure out what I should do next. And I think that was the likely alternative if I'd been trying to do short stories that year.

Anyway, I worked on the Not The Moose, and then I finished reading The Door Into Fire, which is not the Diane Duane book I would recommend most highly, although it wasn't terrible, either. (The love scenes, though. No, no, no, no.) I read the June F&SF, which arrived yesterday, and then I started George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Matt was enthusiastic enough about this series to pass the first two volumes on to me, so I'm giving it another shot. We'll see how it goes. They're pretty long, so they should keep me occupied for awhile. Don't know if I'll read them in quick succession or if I'll need a break between.

Timprov has a different flavor doctor's appointment today, and the Wild are playing tonight. It would be all right with me if they played decently again. They did not deserve to win the last game (and they didn't, for those of you who don't keep track of these things). It would be nice if they could maybe come closer this time. Enough so that the series isn't over in four. I mean, I know the Ducks have been hot in the playoffs, but sheesh.

I have not been doing very well with Mondays the last few weeks, but the up side to that is that Tuesdays and Wednesdays have been better. I don't know why this is: it's not like I have an office to go into on Mondays, and Mark hasn't had any schedule consistency on whether Monday is a work-from-home day or a go-into-the-office day. There shouldn't be anything in particular about Monday. And yet there has been, and it hasn't carried over all that much into Tuesday and Wednesday. As today is Wednesday, I have hopes. Not big hopes. Just a pleasant salad, some work on a book, maybe a little hockey and/or phone conversations. I have the beginnings of the oatmeal pancakes in the fridge, and so I'll probably have the first few of those for lunch and make up a bunch more for later. Marymary calls them bannocks. With that, I want to scorch one and start a big fight over it, just so that I can call it the Battle of...oh, never mind, never mind, you either already know or won't know when I say it, so I'll avoid the direct pun.

Monday afternoon I felt like nothing was ever going to change, like we were going to be doing the same dreary things forever and ever. And I can't say much has changed since then, except how I feel about it: now I feel like things are just about to change. Like we're on the verge of things being much, much better.

I don't believe that there's neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so. Some things just suck, and attempts to make them happy and cheerful are fatuous and unconvincing. But some things do depend a lot on attitude, and evidently this week is one of them. I'm not relying on it to get magically wonderful (although I'll take magically wonderful any day I can get it), but we should be able to make it through okay. Which is all I really ask of a week. A month or a year, I can demand more of those. (And soon, I will.) But a week just has to be tolerable. And I think it will be.