Daily Archives: January 29, 2009

I Am Mighty

To my astonishment, the publisher has agreed to give me to give me pretty damn near what I’d asked for fee-wise for this anthology project. Not only that, the deadline has been extended so I’m not requiring my contributors to cram this into the next two weeks, and I don’t have to try to collate and edit the entire book by an equally insane deadline. Huzzah!

I also finished my first draft of yesterday’s assignment and it’s off waiting for the editor (a different editor, that is; ooh, the glamour of freelancing) to look at it. I also practised the cello. (Treble clef; good gods. Lots of it. And lots of little notes to a single bow in the Hebrides overture. Eep. The 7/8 handles well in that range, I have discovered.) I even tried changing the two lower strings on the 7/8 to the ones my teacher lent to me to see if that improved the projection and balance on the lower end, but they sounded scary and vaguely piano-like and the tension was completely out of whack with the upper two, so I changed them back. The luthier has given me an appointment for next Friday night, so that’s good. (In more ways than one: I’d originally asked for tomorrow night, but if this is indeed the Martian Death Plague, as the unfortunately experienced Mousme suspects, tomorrow night wouldn’t have happened.)

And now, because I have edited a new submission and one of the existing ones, I have accomplished more than what I set out to accomplish today, and I am going to go lie down. Because wow, do I feel woozy.

In Brief

I went on my first cool assignment yesterday. I tried to throw what I could together once I got home, but it’s not going as well as I’d hoped and so I need some of today to finish it off. You will know something about it later today.

The in-progress anthology project I took on as editor (which is not, in fact, one of the cool things I was squeeing about on Tuesday) is proceeding apace. Two-thirds of the people I contacted have responded, most in the affirmative and the others to tell me they’re thinking it over, and I already have one submission in hand. I rock.

The bad news is I am very, very sick. I had a sore throat yesterday and the chills, but by last night I was in complete misery. Fortunately orchestra was cancelled due to the storm, which took the difficult decision to cancel my own attendance out of my hands. I slept awfully, which is to say not at all, and got up around two-thirty to take two ASA tablets. They eased the swollen, painful throat and headache, but landed on an empty stomach and proceeded to make me utterly nauseous as well.

This morning I am shaky and still ill and the golf-ball-sized swelling of my soft palate around my lower sinuses burns every time I try to swallow, and lurks malevolently in between. HRH took pity on me and left late for work in order to be the one to drop the boy off with the caregiver, because I can’t stand up long enough to get to the car and drive. I have a long list of things to work on, none of which include Orchestrated, and because of the freelance assignment I missed practising yesterday as well as orchestra so I need to rearrange things in order to make sure I do at least some simple cello work today.

So I’m going to make more chamomile tea and get to it. Or maybe I’ll go with peppermint, made with mint from Ceri’s garden.