Pleasant Little Things

17 August 2002

Well! Yesterday's mail contained a pleasant surprise: contract, check, and contributor's copy, all in one package. Woo! It was a very small sale (300 words) to a rather small magazine (Short Stuff -- it's seasonal, out of Loveland, CO), but the shortness of it made the smallness of the check work out to be pro rates anyway. The story is "Bright Red -- Aim Here," and it's about aliens and Nebraska football. I sent it to the Colorado mag figuring they'd understand the insanity that is Nebraska football much better than someone farther away, and I was right.

Sales make me happy, no matter how little they are. As Mark said, "This'll keep you in ice cream for a couple of weeks at least."

It seems like the message I'm getting from recent short-listings and sales is "be quirky." Uh, okay. I can do that.

And how.

And! I had a great doctor visit yesterday -- I adore my new doctor. I want to kidnap her and haul her around the country with us wherever we move. She was funny and cheerful and personable, and she let me do everything yesterday instead of paying for one useless "consultation" visit and one useful annual visit, and she didn't make me feel more than minorly icky at any given time. Quite a feat. Well. I'm probably just so enthused because her response to my writing was, "What kind of science fiction? There are so many subgenres." Hee. Fabulous.

Everything is fine on that front, by the way. It's just a change of insurance and a generally cautious yearly-check-up nature that sent me to the doctor in the first place. And we even got the lower number in my blood pressure up into the mid-high-50s. Woohoo! (In health class in high school, they solemnly told us to worry if our diastolic got over 90. Hee. I'm thrilled to death when my systolic gets over 90. Once when my blood pressure was 88 over 48, the doctor looked at me and said, "Gosh, I wonder why you're susceptible to fainting.")

And do you know where I go to get my prescription filled? Essentially, wherever I want to. There's nothing like Kaiser Permanente to make you appreciate the rest of the world, I tell you.

And we had good corn-on-the-cob last night -- the last time we had corn-on-the-cob, I kept thinking, "In Nebraska, we would feed this to the pigs." But this stuff was sweet and good. And we had happy strawberries and happy shortcakes, and we watched "Monk," and I worked and read Kate Wilhelm. Good good.

I finished The Best Defense last night and have started Malice Prepense this morning. Sometimes I think I should ration my Kate Wilhelm consumption so that I still have some new ones left when she dies. But then I think that's stupid, so I don't. Malice Prepense is my fifteenth Kate Wilhelm of the year, though. When I binge, I do it right. I have to be careful not to get too far into Malice Prepense, though, because Amber is coming down around lunchtime and we're heading out to the coast, and I don't want to spend all afternoon fidgeting and thinking about a book I'm not even writing.

I probably will fidget and think about a book I am writing, but that seems more reasonable.

Oh, and I also read my first Sandman yesterday. Season of Mists. I liked it okay, but it seemed like a very much smaller canvas than American Gods or the others. I know what it was! Ooh ooh, I just figured it out. It was like watching a movie or TV show or something. A good deal more like that for me than like reading a book. (I'd be interested in seeing how the rest of you skew it: are comics or graphic novels more like reading or more like watching a screen?) And, I mean, it was much better than most movies or TV shows, so if I think about it that way, definitely cool. It's just that if I think about it as reading, it didn't work for me like a novel would.

So if I read more of them, I just won't think of them as reading, but as viewing. Quiet movies. Problem solved.

We watched "Monk," last night, speaking of shows, and dang. Sometimes they pull out the cheap ending (where nothing has been proven by legal standards, but then the guilty party gets violent and demonstrates his own guilt of some crime, even if it isn't the one in question), but the details, the throwaway lines, I love those. They're so well done. ABC has picked up the reruns of this show, so those of you in this country who don't get USA can still see it if you like. Yay!

I had this big long babble about how home is good, how you should make sure your home is somewhere you like being so that if you stay in on Friday night and eat corn-on-the-cob and watch a detective show, it's a good thing. But none of it was very deep, so, well, whatever, you'll live without it while I continue to work on The World Builders. That is, I hope you'll live without it. You're gonna have to, I guess.

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