Monthly Archives: May 2008

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.

Work Of A Sort

I spent the day researching and looking for images to help inspire me for the YA orchestra novel idea. I alternated between that and writing a 2000 word essay for an anthology I was invited to submit to.

I’m late on the boy’s 35 month post; that was mostly drafted too, but half my photos are on the other hard drive and I hadn’t gotten around to backing them up to the external drive when the hardware failed. I think it’s going to be scant on photos this time around.

And a third random thing: The colour of the 7/8 cello is somewhat like the one of this page, only it’s shinier with a few more amber-caramel tones to it.

Off to get the boy.

Sigh

When uninspired, do research on the last project that interested you.

Which was frustrating on its own, because what I was researching didn’t appear to exist. Until I made myself step outside the train of thought, think tangentially, followed a different route, and discovered that it isn’t called what I logically expected it to be called.

Argh.

Also figured out that I’m going to have to set this book in Canada. Not a bad thing; just that unlike most of my other books, the idea for this one set itself in the US from the get-go. I can’t find enough information about the topic to comfortably set it in the States, though, so Canada it is.

Also, there is no chocolate in the house. This is ungood.

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.

Parallels

Michelle West writes an excellent parallel between writing books and mothering here.

A belated Mother’s Day to all the moms out there. My day began very early, waking up with a jump at the crash made by a small boy dropping a play tea set on the floor next to the bed ( “Oh hi, Mama, I making you tea!”), moved through brunch with the Preston-LeBlanc clan (complete with smoked salmon, mimosas, a heaping bowl of fresh strawberries, and waffles), and ended with an afternoon with HRH’s parents and excellent steak.

Thirty-Five Months Old!

The countdown to three years is officially on!

We are firmly entrenched in the time of “No, I can do it myself!” He insists on pushing shopping carts, strollers, wagons, and anything else he can get his hands on. He vacuums and sweeps, refusing help even when he’s struggling. When we shop at Metro we let him take one of the tiny kid-sized grocery carts and he pushes it around very importantly, putting things in the basket, and then unloading them onto the conveyor belt for the cashier. I spend a lot of my time diverting the cart from crashing into shelves because he looks at the displays and not the aisle ahead of him, or catching it as it falls over when he tries to make too sharp a turn. It is terribly sweet to see how proud he is when he handles it all it, though, and it amuses other shoppers too.

He is also very helpful when we drive. “Green!” he exclaims as soon as a traffic light changes. If I’m not careful he will bounce into the front seat when I get out of the car and say, “I’m driving!” When we start out for wherever we’re headed, he will make his request for whatever music he wants to listen to that day, and then very often shout “Make it louder!” with much glee. Sometimes he listens to whatever classical music I have in the CD player instead of asking for his music to be played, and now and again remarks, “I like this, it’s pretty.”

“It’s big, and huge!” he said excitedly the other day as he was telling us a story. He uses words neither of us remember teaching him — feature, silo, treatment, airflow, aileron — and unless he’s speaking too fast he can be understood by just about anyone. His letter recognition has just skyrocketed (thank you, TMBG — this learning leap brought to you by the letter F for fridge, upon which are the letter magnets) which is kind of dizzying, because suddenly we’re fielding letter questions again, only this time they’re tests of our own knowledge.

Something I’ve never mentioned is that he sleeps with BunBun over his face. I know he’s settling down for the night when he stops chattering and telling a disjointed review of his day to his toys and books and curls up on his side, pulling the stuffed rabbit over his face. Lately he’s been wanting me to curl up with him so he can fall asleep holding my hand, which is fine. I’m not seeing it as a problem, as he falls asleep perfectly normally on his own everywhere else. He’s also taken to inviting BunBun along on outings, and sometimes cradles him across his lap in the car. “This is my baby,” he informed me the other day. “He is hungry. Can he have a graham cracker?” And he solemnly held the cracker to BunBun’s mouth, and then asked for his sippy cup of milk and fed that to BunBun too.

Most of the time if the weather’s nice we take the wagon to the bus stop to meet HRH on his way home from work. Liam now pulls the wagon– or pushes it, depending on his stubborn preschool mood, which engenders resistance when I try to hold the handle to steer the thing. “No, don’t help,” he insists, and stomps his feet in frustration when I explain that someone has to steer or he’ll crash. Or, you know, run over my feet. Again.

He spent much of our Mother’s Day visit to HRH’s parents running around the front lawn, turning over the ornamental rocks in the garden to look for bugs underneath them. He found an ant nursery, which suddenly began boiling over with furious ants shoving little eggs around in the sudden blinding sunlight, and was glued to the sight until we literally dragged him away and replaced the rock over the poor things. When he got tired of turning rocks over he ran up and down the front slope, looping around the pine trees, shouting, “I’m running! I’m running! I’m running around a conifer! C is for conifer! T is for tree!” His favourite DVDs right now, you see, are They Might Be Giants’ Here Come the 1 2 3s and Here Come the A B Cs. Favourite songs include BNL’s ‘7 8 9’, and TMBG’s ‘Seven’, ‘Nine Bowls of Soup’, and ‘Triops Has Three Eyes’, all of which he can be heard singing at various times. He is also fond of ‘Five’ as sung by Robin on The Muppet Show.

He has taken to disguising himself in the bath by scooping up a handful of bubbles and plastering them to his chin, then saying in a deep muffled voice, “Where’s Liam?” which is hilarious to play along with. He has also taken to frequently pretending to be a cat, saying “Meow!” in response to whatever I ask him, and curling up in my lap and leaning against my shoulder. It’s fine by me; I take the opportunity to put my arms around him and stroke his back, and murmur to my Liam-Kitten. His sense of humour is developing nicely. On the other hand, so is the little-boy fascination with Destruction as played out by Toy Cars and Trains. And finally, the enthusiasm for dinosaurs has kicked in. I was beginning to wonder if it ever would.

Recently he was playing with the cardboard tube from a paper towel roll while I made dinner. “Oh, hi,” he said, holding it up to his ear while looking at me. “Hi,” I said back. “I have to go to orchestra now,” he said. I figured out that the tube was a phone and said, “Oh, really?” “Yes,” he said, “you can wave at me through the window.” “Have fun!” I said. “Okay, bye,” he said and ran off, then came back into the kitchen without the tube and said somewhat sheepishly, “I need my cello now?”

He has also discovered painting with tempera and nice big thick paintbrushes! When he gets going he paints in a gleeful frenzy and then cries out, “More paper!” I whip the finished painting away, place a blank piece down in its place, and away he goes again. He is having great fun discovering what happens when he mixes colours together, and what shapes he can make with different strokes of the brush or thumping the bristles down on the paper in various ways. He’s into art, letters, and music; no surprise, I’m sure. But he also loves tossing balls around, playing “sockey” (which is what he calls both soccer and hockey), and riding the trike. It makes for a lot of fun these days.

More Liam posts this past month:

The trip to the EcoMuseum, where Liam loses his cap
The resolution of the hat drama
Liam discovers the library
Liam helps feed the baby squirrels