In Which Our Heroine Numbers the Key Points

29 June 2005

So here are the high spots, quickly:

1) My mouth is much better. I tried tortilla chips when we were eating Mexican food tonight. Those were not such a good idea. Otherwise I'm fine. I notice chewing things more, but it's not generally painful per se. I got the stitches out today, and the dental people were pleased with the progress. So yay.

2) I have sold three short stories -- well, two short stories and a novelette -- in the last week. This qualifies as a good thing, to my reckoning. It is much easier to face the world of submitting yet another novel when the world of submitting short stories has softened up a little bit.

3) We get our puppy! (Many of you have already heard this part.) The breeder said she wished she could keep all of them, but she can't, and the little brown girl wanted to come home with us. Of course she did. Her name is Ista. Today I bought her a red collar and some rawhide chew strips, the little-dog kind. (They have some that outweighed her, I think, in the pet aisle at Cub Foods.)

4) I'm reading Robert Charles Wilson's Spin. I will be writing a little more about it when I'm done, I think, so stay tuned, probably Saturday before we leave.

5) Along those lines, Mark and I and my folks and my grands are going to London on Saturday, and we won't return until the following Saturday. I will take plenty of pictures. It sounds like our hotel room will have high-speed internet connectivity -- ahhh, the modern era -- but I sincerely doubt that I'll spend much time on it, so don't get annoyed if you don't get an immediate response to an e-mail. If you have a genuine emergency, Timprov will have our contact information.

6) It looks like I'll have Thermionic Night out to beta readers before my departure. Rah. I'm still tweaking and tweaking and tweaking this draft. Tweeeeeeeeak. I'm also trying to convince my brain that this does not mean that July is "write a children's novel really really fast" month. Nor Gazillion Short Stories month. Nor, heaven help us, "finish the draft of Midnight Sun Rising month." (I mean, c'mon, it only has somewhere between 50K and 100K left on it, right?) The brain is taking deep, cleansing breaths.

7) Sometimes it is extremely difficult to write reticent characters and still give people an idea of what's going on. This is particularly a drawback when all of the characters in your book are Finnish or British, and most of the British are male. Not insurmountable. Still. (I suppose not all of them are Finnish or British: there's one Latvian, and a Russian, and the Saami could have nationality anywhere in Scandinavia, really. Still.)

8) It's storming quite enthusiastically here, and I'm for bed. G'night.

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