18 July 2003

Give me a minute, I'm still sorting out the words for "yesterday," "today," and "tomorrow."

Yesterday is the one we did already, right? Okay. Yesterday had a sort of brain lull in the middle, but it worked out okay. I read the end of Declare and the beginning of Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter in the lull, and C.J. and Kev both called. So by the time I got out of my brain lull, I'd done several pleasant things anyway.

(Don't take the yesterday/today/tomorrow thing as evidence of a continued brain lull -- I always have trouble with those three.)

Ooh. Teresa Nielsen Hayden linked to a page with some awesome cloisonne pins. Including one of a moose. They also have many others I wouldn't mind having, including a test tube, some hummingbirds, a luna moth -- even the elephant and the double helix rock my world. And the prairie house...the Celtic knots, the books with wings...ooh, the trilobyte...the lightbulb, the dragon, Gengis Khan, kabuki, the geisha, the Tlingit mask (except that it says "Alaska" on it)...if you had asked me, "M'ris, do you want a cloisonne pin of Gengis Khan?", I think I would have said, "Err...no thank you...thanks just the same...." But pretty much all of these pins rock. I now classify them as "fiddly things I wouldn't mind having."

Anyway...I finished typing the stuff I did while I was gone, at least the new stuff. The edits? Er, no. Not particularly. But the new stuff is in and good, and then I went through and made sure that all the scenes that have been written appear in my outline. Then when I add all the new stuff to the outline, I know I've got the old stuff in already, and can work around it. The new stuff should go in today, in substantial quantities. I hope. I've been trying to convince myself that I will do the rest of the outline stuff today rather than getting sidetracked writing new scenes. Yep. Definitely. For sure.

I've already made the chili, and I'll be heading up to David's in a bit. And working, and maybe watching a movie with Mark after dinner. Reading, making cornbread. I got the other story idea I wanted put together ("Thresholds of Pain"), although not in so much detail as "Gilding the Dandelion" (hello, people? Why do none of you offer me opinions when I ask for them? What do I keep you around for, anyway?). I fear that "Thresholds of Pain" is going to be a novelette. I really don't want a novelette. I hate marketing novelettes. But it'll be what it'll be, and I won't try to rush the ending (or the middle or the beginning) just because I hate marketing novelettes.

I do, though.

Jon Truitt suggests that the Happenings books have coupons for $100 off some moving van company. Anybody got a Happenings book with such a coupon that they aren't using, that would apply somewhere we'll be? Was that coherent at all? I hope you know what I meant there.

The bummer for yesterday was that Just Weird Enough lost their funding. I had already cashed the check. Dang. They're hoping to do an anthology, and I think I'll leave the story with them for awhile just in case, unless some other market pops up. This was pretty disappointing to me: it seemed like it'd be a good market, and we could use more children's/YA stuff that isn't trying to cram some message down kids' throats. Especially with Spellbound on indefinite hiatus. Sigh. Their check had already cashed, but that's not really the point.

Well, it's only part of the point. A small part.

I haven't decided what kind of scones I'm making for my birthday yet -- too many fresh fruits, too many choices! -- but when Timprov gets back, I'm going to try baked peaches with almonds and brown sugar. That sounds good, at the very least; it's worth a shot, and it's the type of mostly-fruit dessert that Timprov still eats. I haven't decided whether I'm making myself a cake or some other birthday dessert, either. So many decisions.

I decided to move some items from this week's list to some other week's list -- does it matter, for example, if I clean out the storage closet in the next three days? No. It matters if I clean out the storage closet in the next two and a half months, and that's entirely different.

Two and a half months is really not that long. I'd better have good lists.

Anyway...yeah. Some things are falling into place. It looks like we have special birthday plans with Evan -- I wrote to see if he wanted to get together, and it morphed into a trip to PacBell sometime next weekend. We'll see when he can get tickets. I'm kind of excited -- I haven't been to PacBell. I've been to the Coliseum, and of course the Metrodome, and Royals Stadium. In my mind, it's always freezing cold and rainy and windy at Royals Stadium, because for some reason they had the Twins playing there for the very first and last games of the season the year we lived in Lawrence. We huddled and shivered and cheered for the Twins, but I was disappointed about the fountain. My dad said it was in the middle of center field. What he meant was that it was in the center of the wall behind center field. Which is not particularly interesting at all. The center fielder had to do no special dodging due to this fountain. Hmph.

And my cousin Ruth lived next to the lake, not on the lake, and I did not, in fact, have to go to the bathroom. Some of you know this story already and can skip it: when I was little and we were on a long car trip (so, every other week, essentially), my mom would ask me if I had to go to the bathroom. I would consider. No, I didn't have to; I could wait a good ten, fifteen minutes. So ten, fifteen minutes down the road: "Mommeeeee? I hafta go to the bathroom." She realized that I was pretty literal-minded and started asking me if I wanted to go to the bathroom. Who wants to go to the bathroom? It's not like a hobby or something; it's not fun. So no, I didn't really want to go to the bathroom. Next my poor mother tried, "Can you go to the bathroom?" I was still pondering that one when she snapped, "Oh, for heaven's sake, just try!" And then it was a good decade before she asked again.

I'd like to think that I'm not that literal-minded any more, but in truth I've kept a little of it. It sometimes helps with my writing. It helps prevent the kind of line you shouldn't put in speculative pieces: "Her eyes popped out of her head." Out of her head? Did they roll across the floor? "She was frozen to her chair." With ice, or just her joints frozen? You can't do that kind of thing in a lot of fantasy novels; it's hard to tell when some of it might come out to be literally true. On the other side, some of it is kind of interesting when it is.

But not with the eyes popping thing; I'm not Tim Powers, for heaven's sake.