Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Back To Bad

I avoided opening e-mail this morning until after the boy and I came back from lunch with his grandma and he went down for his nap, and now I know why.

My consultant contract with the publisher isn’t being renewed. Not because they don’t like me, they have hastened to clarify, but because the imprint isn’t doing as well as they want it to (the titles aren’t as successful as titles aimed at basic intro level stuff) and so they’re putting it all on hold indefinitely. My services are no longer needed.

I also got the report on the hearthcraft book. It needs overhauling so that it’s more in tune with what they want before they can accept it and pay me for it. This is tied to the forced name change. Again I am assured that I am one of the best authors they’ve worked with and it just needs tweaking to be less like what I wrote and more like what they want to publish. This is going to delay my payment for another eight weeks. I was really, really counting on it to arrive next month.

No movement/news on the pagan pregnancy book yet.

And our original weekend plans fell through. I wish I was looking forward to the long weekend.

I am really, really not having a good month.

More 7/8 Nattering, With A Side Of Other Stuff

My principal cellist thinks I should get the 7/8. Of course she’s going to listen to critically in a couple of weeks when I take it home on trial, but she strongly endorses the lateral trade notion. She thinks the size and proportion difference will have a positive impact on my playing and comfort.

I am being enabled on all sides. People, you’re killing me! I can’t afford this for another month, assuming my second hearthcraft cheque arrives around the eight week post-delivery mark (which is not guaranteed). And on top of that I need to do about three hundred dollars’ worth of repairs on the cello I’ve got now. And somewhere along the way we need to do the new computer thing, too, although it’s not critical now that I’ve got the laptop pretty much set up for now. Neither is the cello, of course. I hate being in limbo about so much, work-wise and otherwise.

There is some good news today, however: the publisher with whom I set up the freelance manuscript review gig contacted me this morning and told me they’d pretty much settled after their move and were beginning operations again. So that’s less on hold than it was.

Grr

I cannot for the life of me settle down to work on something today. Part of my problem is that I’m not immediately in the middle of a project. And since there’s nothing I have to work in, I get to choose what I’d like to work on, and despite the list of in-progress-at-various-stages novels/novellas and so forth, none of them are calling me. I also can’t pick music to listen to, so I’ve just set my whole collection of MP3s on shuffle. Except now I’m hearing things I don’t recognise and hovering my cursor over the icon of the player to see what it is.

Another more significant part of the problem, I suspect, is that I’m very much in limbo. I’m waiting for word on the pregnancy book. I’m waiting for the editorial letter and first set of edits addressing the hearthcraft book. I’m waiting for the go-ahead from the gaming company to continue developing content. I’m waiting for the publisher for whom I’m doing the freelance manuscript reviews to finish moving and restart operations again.

I wonder if I’m somewhat burnt out. I want to be working on something, I do, because I feel irritated and useless when I’m not. I don’t like feeling irritated, because then when the day is over I feel very nasty about myself because I haven’t accomplished or advanced anything. It’s a stupid, stupid work ethic thing and I can’t shake it.

What I want to do is play the 7/8 again. I don’t want this instrument to eat my brain when I could be using those grey cells for something else. I spent much too much time searching for new hard cases that would fit a 7/8 on the internet this morning. (My old hard case is cracked and weighs a tonne, and my current large 4/4 doesn’t even fill it entirely; a 7/8 would rattle around dangerously in it, beyond what extra padding could do.) I experimented with possible names for it during one of my many wakeful moments last night. Nothing yet. This doesn’t indicate anything yet beyond the fact that it didn’t steal my soul the moment I played it.

I don’t feel like reading, either. Grr, grr, grr.

Friday

In a nutshell, here’s what’s going on:

I interviewed today for a writing-associated position on a game that expands upon the game I worked on last spring, and by the end of the interview the producer said, “Well as far as I’m concerned you’re on the team already, so let’s talk money and time.” In short, I have everything I was concerned about not having: the pay I’ve asked for, flex time, working at home, and the week off when my first round of edits come along, and being on tap for the next round of stuff that’s needed for the game. Plus I have the very excellent bonus of working on a game that will help people understand the art of conversation, how to think through a problem and achieve certain goals using dialogue, and other neat stuff. I am still moderately in a state of stun, as I was expecting to have to turn it down because I thought it would be another full-time in-house deal. Part of the coolness of the project is that it’s still at the development stage; they need content to work with before design goes any further, and that’s why I’m with them.

They laughed when I told them there were now two DS units and a Wii in the house, and that it was their fault.

The car we’d crawled all over and had taken for a test drive Monday evening… was sold last night, eighteen hours before HRH was scheduled to go in and begin negotiating for it. To me this means that this was not our car and we should ask them to keep an eye out for exactly the same thing — which they have already found for us. Go team us! The new one is a year younger, has less than half the kilometres, and is only about $1500 more.

We found a baby squirrel who had fallen out of its lofty nest yesterday afternoon, and after watching for the mama squirrel and fending off neighbourhood cats for a couple of hours, Scarlet took it in. I came home today to discover her at work trying to hold a second baby and draw formula up into a syringe with the other hand. Looks like their mama is history; this second one is skin and bones. I helped feed and deflea the second one, and it’s simply adorable. They’re so young their eyes aren’t even open yet. I’ll be going up to feed it again in half an hour so Scarlet can keep working on her paper.

While I was out there was another plumbing emergency, one that entailed someone getting into our apartment to go into the panel backing onto the bathroom pipes. Seems that when the bathtub was replaced the places that were supposed to be sealed weren’t. The landlord apologised and said it was his fault. What I want to know is why it took five years for this to start leaking downstairs. Anyhow it’s been handled (thank you, Scarlet, for using your keys to get the landlord in and being the Responsible Adult on the Premises while he fixed things), and the backyard plumbing thing was fixed on Wednesday.

I think that’s all at the moment. The boy and I are both still fighting colds. I can’t decide if he has an eye infection or not; sometimes I think he does, and then the symptoms vanish and I’m left suspecting he just has allergies. I’m still having difficulty with the throat/breathing thing myself, and part of that is a cold while the rest is my sensitivity to All Things Green, which just so happen to be going wild right now. The baby leaves out there are so soft and such a perfect green!.

Have an excellent weekend, everyone.

Ta-Da!

Gentle readers, the book tentatively titled The Way of the Hearth Witch: The Magic of Hearth and Home is finished.

All chapter numbers have been corrected, both in chapter headings and in the text; all the proper coding and formatting has been inserted; I caught some things that I had to handle; I took some things out, popped others in, and made sure my bibliography actually listed the books I suggested people read. The final word count stands at 60,141. (There are 6,328 words languishing in my file of deleted material, to give you an idea of what’s come out in the past few days.)

Now I will write my cover letter, and send it off to my editor. And then I suspect I’ll wander around the house aimlessly for a couple of hours, because I do not remember what Life Without Book is like.

ETA: I just sent it all off. I love this book again; I no longer hate it. And you know, I don’t think there’s ever been a book I’ve handed in where I wasn’t wibbly about whether they’d like it or not. I am proud of it; that is what matters this time. And I think they’ll like it.

Erm…

… I think I just finished the book.

Not Finished-Finished, as in ‘I can send this off to the editor now’, but finished-finished in that I think it’s all basically there, and I just need to go through it to insert/check formatting code and scan for highlighted areas where I left myself notes to tidy up or explain or insert things.

There are the rough patches and bits where my argument kind of stops and needs a better summing up before moving on to the next topic, but I’ll leave those for the editors to point out. I can always keep looking at it on my end and fix them when the first rewrite comes back. (I am still twitching obsessively to a degree, but it’s only taken me five books to learn that it does not all have to be perfect in the first draft. Mostly perfect is acceptable.)

And then there’s the search for references to chapter numbers that I have to find and correct, thanks to the new chapter 2.5 (soon to be Chapter Three!). The new chapter is only ten pages long, which is about half the size of an average chapter in this book, so I suspect I’ll be asked to move other material into it or create something the editors feel is missing there. Right now I am too fried to look for it, and the other stuff takes precedence.

So yeah: Finished-Finished tomorrow. Wow. After officially beginning in November and living with the subject for five months, I am definitely at the point of the relationship with this book where I need time away. (it’s not you, book, it’s me, please don’t take it personally.)

It has been a very good day.