I sold my book! The hearth magic book has been accepted! They want to massage the title, but that always happens.
Details of the offer are being discussed. So technically I haven’t really sold it yet, as we still have to work out the offer and my counteroffer… but essentially, yes.
Let the (conditional) rejoicing begin!
(Also, I just realised that this will be book number five. Yikes.)
Liam woke up at 5:20 this morning, and because I have begun doing Clocks-Back-Math in preparation for Sunday (later bedtime, later nap, later getting up… the latter is still theoretical at the moment but the to-sleep times seem to be going well) it meant it would have been 4:20, and there was no way I was going to let that become a precedent. I got up and asked him if he needed to go to the bathroom, and he did (the night-time diaper was only a teeny bit damp, too!). Then we went back into his dark room and I read him a quiet story, put him back in his bed, and said night-night. He played quietly until he fell asleep, and slept almost two more hours till 7:45. (Well, 6:45 if I carry the Clocks-Back-Math through properly.) The one good thing about the sun not rising till seven-thirty these days is you can tell a toddler it’s the middle of the night and he believes you.
He asked to wear his Incredibles shirt again today. I’m going to have to get transfer paper for dark colours and do a better one for him. I foresee a series of cool personalised shirts as treats, now that we’ve begun. There’s a Totoro one in his future, maybe with soot-sprites on the sleeves.
Newest cool word he uses: ‘dirigible’.
No more Hallowe’en photos as of yet; we didn’t get any more ourselves, but somewhere down the line there may be some from his caregiver. He had a wonderful time with his playmates there yesterday, bobbing for apples (he got one!), watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and reading monster stories. He even got a little loot bag from his caregiver at the end of the day; we tried to get him to say “trick or treat!” for it but all he managed was “Please? Treat?” When he opened it at home, it was hilarious to see him pull out the candy and discard it beside him, ignoring it in favour of the Hallowe’en pencil and eraser.
He asked me to draw myself with my cello today while we ate breakfast.
I’m sure some people are wondering when I’m going to get around to wishing the world a blessed Samhain. I’m one of those people who calculates the four fixed-date festivals astronomically, as the solstices and equinoxes are calculated, so my Samhain happens sometime next week; November 8 this year, if I remember correctly. (If you’re curious, they’re as follows: 0 degrees Aries – Vernal Equinox; 15 degrees Taurus – Beltane; 0 degrees Cancer – Summer Solstice; 15 degrees – Leo – Lughnassadh; 0 degrees Libra – Autumnal Equinox; 15 degrees Scorpio – Samhain; 0 degrees Capricorn – Winter Solstice; 15 degrees Aquarius – Imbolc.)
Right; back to work.
Extras by Scott Westerfeld
The Time Travelers (Gideon the Cutpurse) by Linda Buckley-Archer
Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould by Kevin Bazzana
Making Music for the Joy of It by Stephanie Judy
Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Devilish by Maureen Johnson
A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle (reread)
A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L’Engle (reread)
Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles: The Nixie’s Song by Holly Black & Tony Tetrazzini
Extras, Devilish, and Twilight were, as I expected, consumed in one sitting each. I feel slightly bad for the YA writers I read, because I know how much work goes into crafting a book, and then I plough through it in an hour and a half.
Most of the month was taken up by the Bazzana book on Gould and the Judy book on adult amateur music-making, both thought-provoking non-fic.
This? Is fun. I like editing technical documents that I can understand.
I’ll have to work tomorrow night to make up for the half-day earlier that they want the document, and the half-day I lost today to a very slow file transfer, but it’s all hours.
I like work that is fun. It’s not exciting, but fun. Particularly in the not-insanely-stressful vein.
This has been what is known as a Bad Day.
The boy has been simply crazy. I have managed to make soup, and cupcakes, and bread all from scratch in an attempt to keep myself sane. I’m trying to find comfort in that. But there were laundry issues that threw my daily plan out of whack, and that potential client still hasn’t gotten back to me to confirm a contract that begins tomorrow. There has been no reply to my last two messages. The former outlined my fee and delivery bid; the latter reiterated the information and also courteously pointed out that I required confirmation, as I have the rest of the week to schedule. Still nothing. At this point, I am severely tempted to send them a polite message saying that as they have not replied to me I can only assume that they will not be availing themselves of my services, and that I have taken another contract that came up instead. (Granted, the other contract consists of paying work next week, but I may also be on the verge of selling a book; I’ll know tomorrow.) My week is in a holding pattern; their last communication was on Friday, to which I replied Monday morning. I am not a fan of freelancers being ignored until they’re suddenly needed yesterday. Particularly for a three-day deal with a ‘we must have it by this date’ deadline.
On the brighter side of things, HRH had good payroll news today: they’re treating each year of animation experience as equivalent work experience, and each year of education beyond the required level as two years. He just needs declarations of term of employment from his past employers. And once it’s all settled, he will receive a retroactive cheque to cover the deficit beyond the base salary the job offers. Very nice indeed.
The boy may have a Hallowe’en costume tomorrow, more for his entertainment than anything else. We shall see how creative I can be tonight. No stress, just fun.
… have been greatly exaggerated. In actual fact, what happened was that I sprained my right wrist, which made typing incredibly painful and life with a toddler remarkably difficult in general. I couldn’t pick anything up, hold a pencil, open jars, slice cheese or meat, put my arm through the sleeve of my jacket, sling my bag over my shoulder… it was challenging.
Lots of things happened in the past six days, including a wonderful play date with Curtana and Arthur; a fabulous dinner out Friday night with friends; a lovely few hours Friday morning and early afternoon spent with Rosy, her husband, and her dog (who loved the owly shoes even more than Liam does!); a fun but quick visit with t! and Jan; and dinner with the ADZO household. We also got our chest freezer and it is now happily full of organic beef and other goodies.
I know I’m missing things, but that was the week in a nutshell. Now I’m reviewing a technical document to determine a fee for editing it at the end of the week, and it’s nowhere near as bad as I’d expected it to be, which is wonderful — it means I won’t have to sacrifice nights and brain cells to it. And I’m still taking it easy on my wrist. The last thing I need is to wrench it back into an unusable state.
The word for the weekend: sick. The damn cold went into my chest and knocked me out. Most things got cancelled. I passed out during Liam’s naps both days, and messed up my night sleep patterns as a result. Or maybe I napped hard because my night sleep patterns were already messed up by not being able to breathe. I had to sneak into the boy’s room Saturday night to borrow his Ventolin. (Why do I not currently have one of my own? Because I only use it once every couple of years and it keeps expiring before I’ve used it.) It was not a pleasant weekend. At least today I can walk from one room to another without having to sit down and catch my breath.
I made chili and applesauce and apple crisp last night. Despite the unseasonably warm temperatures (which I have been enjoying, along with a sense of guilt because it’s just all wrong) I appear to be gearing down into comfort food mode in anticipation of Real Fall.
As Hallowe’en approaches, the requests to borrow my costumes begin landing in my inbox. Especially the Van Helsing set, just like last year. So just as an advance announcement: really, I can’t lend anything out to anyone, whether I know you or not. I am a firm supporter of hot glue and safety pins for a costume that will last one single night, and nothing is in any kind of state to be lent out. Also, everything’s in storage. And my costumes are so ridiculously small that I doubt they’d fit the average person.
Speaking of costumes, this weekend HRH and I realised that it’s just not going to be practical to introduce the boy to Hallowe’en this year. Between getting him home from daycare, making and eating dinner, HRH getting home from work and me leaving for orchestra… it’s just not going to happen. I don’t think we’ll even be handing out candy, for the same reasons. Wednesdays are just too tightly scheduled and there’s no room to move. I’ll put all the fabric and trim and patterns aside and make him his swashbuckling coat next year instead, when his bedtime won’t interfere with the fun.
HRH has been having a wonderful time at work, thank you for asking. The irony of the nice new job is that the way paydays have worked out, things are going to be uncomfortably tight for the next week and a half, especially because we have several direct payments going out in the next five days. And we had to buy a new vacuum yesterday because the one we’ve been using and patching for the past eight years self-destructed in an impressive cloud of white smoke and the smell of burning. Fortunately, we got a great bagless one on sale, and it’s light enough that I can use this one. Still, it would have been nice if it had waited two weeks to die its final death.
More editing today, with Mousme to keep me honest and supplied with tea while I have a cat on my lap. Maggie has been alternately very clingy and kittenish over the past few days, and today appears to be a clingy day.