20 April 2005

Since my alpha readers are thoughtful people who don't just say, "Oh, yeah, book, nice," and pat my head and walk away, I'm still waiting to hear what they think. This is a reasonable and probably optimal situation. I want to make it clear that I am not in any way complaining. But I'm also not starting to work seriously on the draft of another book, because, I mean, really, how many piled up drafts does one person need? (Answer: possibly fewer than I have.)

Which means that I'm in the curious position of not writing a book right now. It's very strange. I'm not sure how it goes. It's wandery and awkward. I realize that many of you are permanently not writing a book -- that much of humanity, most of humanity, goes around not writing a book for their entire lives -- but much of humanity also goes around male for their entire lives, and it would still be weird and uncomfortable for me if I had to do it for a couple of weeks.

Not writing a book means that I'm not writing seriously on one book. What it also means is that I worked on three books yesterday. Sure! Not writing a book! No, seriously, it works that way in my head. If I'm poking around at several, the brain is not settled.

(It may be settling on the Aesir noir novel without me. But we're trying not.)

In other news, I'm still getting over getting sick, but it seems to be going away pretty promptly. I'm supposed to go down to the alma mater to have lunch with my advisor tomorrow, and I feel pretty sure I'll be well enough for that. I haven't been down to St. Pete since we moved home, and it'll be interesting to see what it looks like now. Where by "interesting" I mean "deeply weird and probably somewhat unsettling." They were still recovering from the tornado when I left, in addition to the other normal changes that happen over six years.

I have now been away from Gustavus for longer than I was at Gustavus in the first place. That actually seems about right. When we'd lived in California for as long as I'd been at Gustavus, that seemed wrong. But -- yeah, I've been gone, I've moved on, I expect that the old place has, too.

The really weird thing is going to be saying goodbye to my old dorm. They're tearing it down this summer. I lived there all four years. I talked about it a bit on lj, and I'm probably not done talking about it. I'm...well, it was a wreck even when I lived there, but it was my wreck, my home for four years. If they weren't keeping the physics building the same, I don't think I'd care about the rest of the campus very much. Wahlstrom and Olin formed the axis of my life for four years. At least Olin was new a few years before I got there, so they're unlikely to mess with it too much.

Anyway, my advisor will be himself, and that'll be fun, and I'll deal with the rest as it comes up. And take a few pictures, maybe. We'll see.