21 January 2002

I find it quite ironic that we celebrate (er, observe) someone who worked his butt off by taking the day off work. Just a thought. Well, I don't take the day off work. But the mailman does, which is frustrating enough.

These revisions are kicking my butt. Really. Not easy. Part of it is that I have to just write a ton of new words on the ending, because the consensus was that it needs more stuff to be resolved. So there's that. Some of the stuff is easy -- checking for continuity errors in a couple of places, I can do that. Those are the easy things. But totally rewriting the first eight pages so that they say roughly the same things in better words? Not easy. I can do it. I have been doing it. But it is, I will say again, not easy. Hard, even.

So. It may be the end of the month before I have this finished up and sent out again -- to the publisher and to those of you who were promised a copy. (Right now that's the folks and David. I don't think I'm missing anybody, but let me know.) I hope not. I feel it looming over me. I know these revisions are going to improve it, but I really hate to revisit it this extensively after this long. I like getting feedback, though, and I trust Mark and Timprov's comments on it, and I think the book will be much better for them. I just may want to rip my hands off at the wrists before I'm done.

I was just cranky last night. I decided that I hated revisions, hated the book I'm reading, hated the TV, and was seriously annoyed with a few other things. I don't know why I was so cranky. It was a decent day. I talked at length to Scott and then at considerably less length to my parents, who were surprised at how long I'd talked to Scott. I'm amused that this still surprises them, because we've been having conversations of this length for eleven years. I mean, I know that one year is proportionally more of my life than it is of my folks'. But still. Eleven years. We didn't stop the marathon phone conversations when we moved to different states, when we started dating, when we broke up, when I got married, or, heck, when we'd just spent five hours in each other's company that day already. Why would we stop now?

So I talked to Scott and had yummy leftovers for dinner, and I had no reason whatsoever to be cranky. But I was. Luckily, Timprov was being asleep and sick (oh yeah, that's lucky), and Mark was not in a chatty mood, so I didn't have not to snap anyone's head off. Mark's grandpa says that sometimes being nice just gives him a headache. And he's one of the nicest and best people I know. (There's a difference between being a nice person and being a good person. Really.) I avoided writing some e-mails, because they involve discussions that so far have been impassioned but not acrimonious, and if I can't keep up a discussion without saying, "Oh yeah? Well, your feet smell!" then I shut up and go away somewhere until I can.

Also I avoided the e-mails because I was working. Of course.

I feel like everything is work-related right now. I know that it's important to read research books, but Treason in the Blood is huge, and I haven't been taking as much reading time as usual lately. As a result, it seems like even my down time isn't very far down. I worked on everything I was planning to work on yesterday, and I did enjoy taking the time to talk to Scott and the folks. It's just that I don't see much down time to come, either. I have a week with these library books, and I don't want to hang around whining about how hard it is to do revisions on my book. I just want to dig in and do them.

It always startles me that British people revise for exams rather than reviewing for them. But that's not here or there.

I'm not sure where here and there are, just now. I have an appointment with Dr. Bill this afternoon, and that should take care of some of the residual crankiness from last night. Problem is, Dr. Bill is up in Pleasant Hill, so that's going to be at least two hours worth of commitment. I switched my regular doctor over to one down here when we moved (about a year ago now!), but it's so hard to find a chiropractor you can trust that I don't really want to get a substitute Bill. I know I'll have to when we move again, but odds are pretty good that we'll know somebody in the immediate area there who either has a chiropractor or knows someone else who does. (If we move to the Cities, of course, the guy who fixed my mom can tell me where to go.)

If I keep whining, you're all going to want to tell me where to go. There's nothing really wrong, except that Timprov is sick and Mark is still a tiny bit snozzly and I hurt. And we're going to fix up the last, at least. So, in general in my life, no earth-shaking wrongness. Just a sort of whiny feeling. I'm going to put off reading slush because of it, though. I felt like a couple of things in the slush pile yesterday were absolute gifts, but I'm going to try to spend some of my reading time on a break today. So. Letters to put in the mail (yes, Liz, that's you), edits to do on the book, guacamole to make, laundry to finish, stories to write, essays to polish, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it. I'm swamped.