5 September 2001

The good news is that I had a nice trip, got to see many people I wanted to see and pretty much nobody I didn't want to see, worked on some stories, read some books.

The bad news is that I still have to call in to find out whether I have to spend my afternoon not getting picked for jury duty.

That's fairly minimal bad news, I'm thinking.

It was a three rejection weekend, so I suppose that could count as the bad news. But for at least one of the stories, I had no illusions that the editor would actually accept it. I sent it to her as a stall so that I wouldn't have too many stories in somewhere else, and it worked: now I can send it out to the editor who might actually like it and still feel like I tried one of the long shots with a reasonable response time.

Mark just got an ad that was supposed to be "PayPal Java programmer wanted," but instead read, "Papal Java programmer wanted." I didn't know the Pope could run Java scripts.

I'm going to post a bunch of pictures from this weekend, but I don't really have time for that today, if I have jury duty. So. A few quick notions:

Don't fly Southwest if you can help it. They got the brilliant idea that it would be best if you never got a boarding pass when you checked your bags. Instead, it would be in everybody's best interest to have to check in at the gate for every plane. Thereby ensuring that we got to wait in three lines per trip rather than just one. Also, they emphasized, just so that I'd have one more thing to worry about, that the only thing that would guarantee me a seat on the plane was a plastic boarding card from gate check-in. So if our connecting flight was a little late....

I have a new standard for what bad writing is. Bad writing is if you can take the Enigma project, persecution, and suicide, and make them boring. Alan Turing: The Enigma. One of the most boring books I've ever read. Never, ever, ever write about your subject's suicide and then spend thirty pages afterwards explaining why he did it, in your humble opinion. (Because he was gay. Same reason everyone else thinks he did it. Because he was gay and the government was making him take estrogen and hounding every aspect of his life. This was not a hard one to interpret. But instead of having all that come first, it was, oh, he killed himself, oh, here's why. Bad bad bad bad bad.)

It did give me a tiny bit of insight into the social forces that would shape two of my major characters for the Not The Moose Book. But I got a lot more "work stuff" out of Trickster Makes This World -- even, or perhaps especially, when I totally disagreed with the author. Two new stories, one of them fantasy, one of them SF, neither of them fully drafted, but what's this week for?

Oh yeah. Homecomings and jury duty, perhaps. We shall see. I'll keep you posted.

One more thing: Timprov didn't post about my new project because he has several of his own. But it'll be up soon. Really.