In Which Our Heroine Can Barely Keep Still

22 August 2003

Evidently I managed to convince my brain that mathematics itself would remain constant over the course of last night: both the math of buying a house and the math of getting to the airport on time. Nobody was going to magically decide, overnight, that we had to give them all X hundred thousand dollars for the house at once; nobody was going to decide that a 5:30 p.m. departure plus two hours' lead time plus forty-five minutes' drive time meant that we had to leave for the airport at 4:00 a.m. So I slept until 6:00, which is a human hour to my way of thinking (yes, I'm a morning person), and didn't wake up frantically going over down payments and interest rates in my head.

Much better than yesterday morning. Really. I did a lot of good work yesterday, but I also crashed out hard in the middle of the afternoon. After failed attempts at productivity, I sat down and reread Madeleine L'Engle's Meet the Austins in one go, and then made Kraft dinner and ate a plum. And then all was well and I could get to packing and essaying and credit card statement verifying (I have the feeling most people don't do this, but I can't really not) and working on "Silent Teraphim."

Meet the Austins is not as lame as the title, by the way. I would not be surprised if nobody at all read it these days until they'd already read A Ring of Endless Light or Troubling a Star or The Young Unicorns or even The Moon By Night and were already interested in these characters, because Meet the Austins is such an uninspiring title. It's also not my favorite of L'Engle's books, but it's comforting and sweet and a beginning of Vicky's perspective. Also, I've read the others semi-recently, except for The Moon By Night, which I packed to go home this time and probably stay there.

I liked Sold Into Egypt, too; I liked the way she didn't mind putting her own personal interests, obsessions, and concerns into it, the way she didn't pretend she wasn't. It was not intended to be a piece of journalism, an historical study, or anything of the kind. It worked as a personal reflection, I think.

I'm not so keen on Tony Daniel's Earthling, although it's picked up quite nicely after the first 100 pages. We'll see. I liked Metaplanetary, so I was willing to go with it for long enough to get to the part where it picked up. Otherwise, I might not have been so patient.

I think I just sold the essay I talked about yesterday, but I'm not entirely sure; the way the editor in question phrased it was questionable. A probable acceptance, at least, which is good. If I have time to finish another, I'll send it to her before we go, but I'm going to focus on "Silent Teraphim" first, and on a few last things before we head out.

I'll be in e-mail contact while I'm gone, although I can't make any guarantees about how fast my replies will be. I still like to hear from you-all, even if it takes me longer to reply. I'm only a little bit jealous of those of you who are going to WorldCon -- it sounds like great fun, but I'm going to Minneapolis to find a place to live, and I can't think of very many things that would make me not want to do that.

I think I'll be able to keep it together long enough to get my work done and a few household chores, too, rather than just dancing around the house singing a "moving to Minneapolis" song. I hope so. Next time I post, there should be all kinds of news of one sort or another. Maybe even pictures. It's going to be good. Wheeeeee!

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