Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

Hello World…

… I am not dead, just busy. (And in a curious amount of pain, for some reason. It’s fine as long as I don’t move.)

The concert was lovely. As I expected I enjoyed myself immensely for the first half and played very well, with the overture standing out as particularly good. As I’d feared, though, I began wilting in the symphony. I aced and loved the first movement but the second movement was faster than usual, which was fine up till the fugue-type bit started by the cellos. As we came up to it I realized that there was no way I could do it at that speed so I just hung on and did what I could. Which wasn’t much, really, and it depressed me despite knowing that it was the speed and not my ability. The mood clung to me and I just couldn’t enjoy the scherzo and trio much, but I was bound and determined to enjoy the fourth movement, and I did, but only because I insisted on it.

Thank you to HRH, Ceri, Scott, Marc M, Marc L, Mel, Amanda, and Val for sharing the evening with us. I think the audience was at about sixty percent capacity, although it really seemed like more when everyone congregated in the hall for cider and cookies at intermission. I can’t even estimate actual numbers.

Now we have two weeks off. This may not be a bad thing, as I suspect the pain at the base of my spine is from sitting in the new chairs three times in four days.

I took my manuscript printout with me when I dropped the boy off at the caregiver’s yesterday, and betook myself to the cafe in which I used to write before we moved. I got myself a decaf latte and a brownie, then sat and worked on editing the manuscript for two hours. It was good to be out, in a silver of sun that slowly moved from my papers to myself, away from the distractions of the internet, my bookshelves, and the chores in the kitchen. I slashed and rewrote Chapter Three and some of Four, then came home and began transferring last week’s edits to the file. Chapter One and Two are mostly done now, with just one or two places I’ve marked to polish or check a fact. I think I’ll be doing the cafe thing again on Wednesday, except I may try a different location because the music was loud and not very conducive to my mood. Trying to listen to my MP3 player above the cafe’s music was worse, though. When I used to go there the staff was friendlier, and they played jazz.

It was so beautiful yesterday that I had the back door open while I was making dinner. Sparky and I were watching blackbirds from the back deck when we had a visit from a rather large plump squirrel. It climbed up the stairs and inched its way on to the deck looking at us expectantly, and I had visions of the thing turning ugly when I informed it that we were not serving. I also hoped that none of the cats were sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, or they’d be outside like a shot. Sparky spent a lot of time between the car and the front door bending over to see the quarter-inch tall first signs of all the bulbs we planted last fall, poking at them and saying with great excitement that he could see the flowers growing. And we saw a robin, which was lovely too.

Spring is good. And it’s not going to take as long for all the snow to melt as we’d expected, because the temperature has radically readjusted and we’re looking at sun all week (Thirteen degrees today and Thursday! Sixteen degrees tomorrow!) with periodic clouds and scattered showers before light rain all weekend. The middle of the back yard is already mud and dead grass. The sun is doing wonders for my outlook.

Sparky and I are home together today and having a lovely time so far.

*facepalm*

Now I remember what I did yesterday afternoon. You know, those couple of hours I spent staring at the monitor, but thought I’d just spaced out? I transferred a bunch of web pages to the pro site.

It did not go smoothly. I got it in the end, though. No wonder I wiped it out of my memory.

Today’s web work has also not gone smoothly.

Coding is never as easy as it presents itself to be. According to the instructions I’ve been following, my redirects should all work, and they don’t. The redirection keeps adding a trailing backslash when I am very specifically not typing one in, and everything breaks along the way. And the redirects I’ve taken off/edited show as taken off/edited in my list of redirects, but are still redirecting incorrectly when I actually type the page address in. Wake me up when everything is as it’s supposed to be.

(Why yes, I am avoiding the spread of manuscript pages on the floor of the living room. Why do you ask?)

I wish I had the money to hire someone to do this.

ETA: Well, that will solve things eventually — I just deleted the subdomain. Not on purpose, mind you, but I am not at all fussed about it. And guess what? The non-existent subdomain still redirects. Which means that for whatever reason, the changes I’m making aren’t updating properly. I may or may not recreate the subdomain expressly for the purpose of having a redirection. Not important at the moment; people can default to the second URL on my business cards.

Done!

The PDF of the proofs has been returned and are out of my hands, assuming nothing goes wrong and I have to print the pages out and courier them or something. And I handed them in only half an hour past when I wanted them gone. (Also, two and a half days before deadline. Go team me.)

I’m going to get up and walk away, have a drink, and then try to do something with the pile of paper in the folder marked ‘Hearthcraft’ that’s sitting on my writing desk.

Growl


Stupid page proofs.

I’m going to STET all the punctuation corrections I did. I think. Maybe. Well, I’ll take it on a case-by-case basis.

I’m catching other errors on the second go-through. I wish inconsistencies in phrasing through rituals etc. had been caught in copy-edits. I wish they’d been more stringent. This will teach me to crow about an easy copy-edit review.

I want these gone, gone, gone by tomorrow. I need the time to finish the other book, you know, the one that needs to be handed in in a week or so?

Ta-Da!

Finished the first pass through the proofs! Now I have to go back and check the notes I made, and re-read the first half to make sure I’ve caught errors I found later. (A ‘censor’ is not needed for a ritual involving incense, whereas a ‘censer’ is. Am I ever glad I caught that one.) And now I’m wibbling about my ruthless elimination of commas for invocations in the latter half of the book; they do work well in some instances. Sigh.

I read a paragraph and choked up. That’s never happened before.

Hmm…

I see that a lot of the corrections I’m asking for in these page proofs are things that possibly could have been caught in the copyedit stage, but weren’t. I assume they weren’t pointed out because the copyeditor wanted to leave my prose as close to my original voice as possible, but I wish the slightly clumsy phrasings and inconsistent punctuation in invocations (ah, those commas) had been tagged earlier. Understanding what something says doesn’t mean there can’t be a clearer way to say it. And rereading it fully now, as opposed to going through the CEM edit by edit, I’m seeing places I wish had been pointed out. Oh well; if it’s crucial I’m correcting it; I’m correcting things to maintain consistency of formatting; and anything that misleads at first reading I’m correcting as well.

And still I’m pausing at other places and weighing how important a change would be. Sigh.

I veer between admiring how tightly certain sections are written, and wondering how other such messy bits got past the editors.

Just started chapter eight. I’ve done a chapter and a half this morning already, the same amount I covered yesterday. Fewer edits and corrections to point out today, obviously.