28 August 2002

Days left to deadline: 3.

Days left to final draft goal date: 1.

Pages of The World Builders written (total): 159. (Last crit and read-through remaining.)

I'm going to leave The World Builders be until I get my last crit on it. And then I shall work like mad, and print like mad, and all will be well. Hee. It's still a tiny bit unreal, but I suppose it'll feel real enough when I pick up the final draft in my hands and put it in the envelope to go.

I want to say right here that I disapprove of hacking and other such illegal activities, and thus I do not advocate the very amusing hack done on the RIAA website (here, if they've fixed it already). Honestly, it couldn't have happened to a nicer bunch of people. Nor one more likely to feel that their point was supported by the very action...but ten'll get you twenty their tech support is laughing its butts off. And if I'm given an option that enrages the RIAA officials and amuses the tech support...well, it'd take a very strong will to resist that, is what I'm saying, even knowing that it's wrong.

Scott had an interesting point last night, and one I'd like to pose to you-all, in case you have an answer. He would like to know, if people claim watching bad things makes you desensitized to them, why does no one claim that watching happy things makes you desensitized to them? If action flicks make you believe no consequences will occur if you shoot someone in the head, does "Touched By An Angel" make you believe no consequences will occur if you're nice to people and do The Right Thing? Should we avoid watching "The Wonder Years" lest we become numb to the sweetness of young love and the grand surprises of growing up?

(Actually, I think to a certain extent, I am desensitized -- when Vicky taught Adam to dance in "A Ring of Endless Light," the movie version, I, like Thomas, was almost too convulsed with laughter to notice that the actors were doing the best they could with the script. I was not very sensitive to that. Of course, that might just be cliche in action, rather than desensitization....)

Ah well. So yesterday I worked on The World Builders and worked on the Not The Moose Book a little (more note-taking and outline refinement than actual prose) and read Defense for the Devil, which was not my favorite in the series but was still pretty good. And now I'm reading Annie Dillard's For the Time Being. The first chapter was excerpted somewhere -- I'd read it before but have not read the rest of the book -- and I really think that was a bad idea. Much of the charm and the interest of this book is kind of the sonata form, where the different themes come up and are developed and then switch in for another theme and are developed again. And sure, you can play the introductory theme of a sonata and sometimes enjoy it, but...not at all the same thing.

Hey. Tomorrow is WorldCon. Tomorrow I will be getting cleaned up and dressed at roughly this time so that we can go fetch Thomas from the airport and start doing cool stuff with cool people. So today is laundry, bill-paying, doctor-consulting, boot-cleaning-and-waterproofing, possibly baking and potato salad making...many goodly things, none of them very externally interesting. The debate of whether to make peach scones or Grandma's blueberry muffins or Grandma Gritter's cinnamon bread can occupy me for a good while. You, I would think not. Unless you got to lick the pan. For which you'd have to call awfully quickly, I think. But I'll almost certainly finish the Annie Dillard and start reading something else, and maybe that'll be interesting; and I'll almost certainly get something done on the Not The Moose, and maybe that will be interesting, too.

I'm a little off of short stories lately. I don't know why. I poked at some of them yesterday, but they all seemed like really lame ideas. And I know they weren't. I just didn't feel like doing anything short. I guess that's good -- I mean, I'll be less distracted while working on the Not The Moose -- but it's kind of strange. Usually when I finish something longer, I want to work on something shorter. Evidently my brain has classified The World Builders as "something shorter." So. Okay then.

The WorldCon-related headline on page 2 of the entertainment section of the Merc: "Patrick Stewart to speak at science-fiction convention." And I thought, hey, really? I didn't know that. And then I thought, um, oh yeah, that would be because I didn't care. It's not that I dislike Star Trek. It's that, well, given the choices of Patrick Stewart talking, Lawrence Schoen reading, and the Del Rey party...I may have a tough choice or try to do more than one thing, but it won't involve Patrick Stewart. But it's typical -- you'd think Stewart was the Guest of Honor. The actual GoH is mentioned nowhere at all. Because what could be more important to those sci-fi geeks than Star Trek, right?

Ah well. It won't really affect my WorldCon experience, so I suppose I shouldn't worry about it. Much to do. Little time. Take care. Oh, and I've gotten e-mails asking where we're staying for WorldCon. People, we're staying home. We're half an hour or forty minutes from downtown San Jose. We don't have the money to spend on four nights of hotel since it's fairly reasonable to avoid it. I know it's not the ultimate con experience. You don't need to tell me that. But it's what we can do, and I think it'll work out just fine. I'll be sure to let you know. I don't expect to be as on-the-ball for e-mail, and my entries may be shorter, but I'll still be here. And it's warm here today! Woohoo! Maybe I won't have to wear tights after all. We can hope.

We can hope. But it's okay if some of you don't bother, on this one.