May 20 2017

Slight change of plan

Rosemary

Original plan for yesterday: Head over to my office; answer emails, & catch up on news; review my recent work on Book 5;  autograph, package and mail out two books for the winners of the Con or Bust auction; take a walk; do new work on Book 5; play some guitar; read; work on the book some more; more guitar or some handicrafts; go home.

Revised plan: Wake up from a dream that someone was stabbing me in the back; realize it’s a kidney stone attack; attempt to tough it out with ibuprofen and lots of water; give up after 12 hours, and have my sister drive me to the ER; wait around for many more hours; get some heavy duty pain meds; see the ER doc; get a cat scan; get prescription for more meds; go home.

Original plan for today: similar to original plan for yesterday

Revised plan for today: sleep off massive hangover from yesterday’s meds; eat chicken soup; watch TV; more sleep.

I must again thank my wonderful sister, who gave up a night’s work to shuttle me around, and sit by me in the ER, and pick up my prescription in the morning, and make me soup.  Things would have been utterly dreadful without her.

We did get to watch part of Home Alone Two and Independence Day on the ER room’s TV.   None of which was particularly entertaining to me — until I got Dilaudid, after which everything was entertaining, including the cat scan.

This was very inconvenient, and not according to plan!  The Genrettes meeting had been postponed to the 28th and I was hoping to crank out some more wordage for them to consider.  Instead, we’ll probably have to make do with what I sent them for the originally planned meeting.

Thus, I grumble.

Ah, well.   Time for more meds.   And some TV.  And soup.

PS: did you know that they changed the design of the stars in Campbell’s chicken & stars soup?  True fact.

 


May 12 2017

Brain-fried, but in a good way.

Rosemary

I’ve just spent the last week or so prepping stuff to present to my writers’ group, the Fabulous Genrettes.

I’m up next!  On Sunday!  And our last meeting was just on April 30th, so that’s less than two weeks between sessions.  But Delia Sherman will be heading off to Paris quite soon, there to live for a year.  Just because.

(Ellen, of course, will be going as well.  They have an apartment!   That’s what you do, if you are famous, cultured and erudite:  a year in Paris.   I, on the other hand, am merely a slightly famous, nerdy autodidact.   There’s lots of us, actually.  We should form a national association!  No, wait, we’re all introverts. )

Anyway, I had not much time to organize the stuff I have on hand into something both readable and critique-able.   Had to pull out all the stops (which is a lovely metaphor from pipe-organ terminology, she pointed out  nerdishly).

Actually, I quite enjoyed it… I did a lot of late-night writing, and managed to remind myself that I really do prefer writing late at night and into the wee hours.   And often enough, into  the slightly larger hours.   I really ought to just embrace that.

I’m smarter at night.   I just am.

Although, parts of the tale that I thought would be easy, turned out to involve more heavy lifting than I expected.    And of course, much needs to be discussed with Delia and Laurie J. Marks.   I might have to print out a map for us to confer over, as the story involves a whole lot of movement across great swathes of  landscape.

I did manage to take a break from the push, on Saturday, when I attended a concert.   My friend Rob is a member of the Mendelssohn Choir, and they had a joint concert with the Civic Orchestra of New Haven.   The first half was just the orchestra, doing Tchaikovsky’s Symphony Number 4, which I’ve heard possibly one other time in my life, and was a treat.   The second half was John Rutter’s Requiem, totally new to me, which had text in both English and Latin.  Alas, the printed text in the program used a very small font, which made it hard to read in the dimmed auditorium, and the acoustics did not allow the English portion to be entirely understandable, so I had to pretty much guess what was being said, and check the program later when the concert was over.  Oddly, it turned out that I recognized the Latin more easily than the English.

The concert was at Yale University’s Woolsey Hall, which is was built in 1901, in a Beaux Arts style, which I found rather fun.  A lot of Yale looks pretty grim, but this place was festooned with carven wreaths and cameos of the nine Muses plus Athena on the ceiling.

Muses plus Athena.

And a bit of trompe l’oeil sky on the ceiling.  I’m a sucker for trompe l’oeil skies.

In other news:  My planned trip to Helsinki for Worldcon looks less and less likely.   It’s just a very expensive proposition, and at this particular point I don’t have a lot of financial leeway.  Just one of those timing things.

I am, however, still slated for Readercon.

Arg.  Very tired after this big push.  I’m going to practice some guitar, and call it a night.

They also had a Calder stabile/mobile in the courtyard.

 

 


May 4 2017

Con or Bust bidding is ending on May 7

Rosemary

So, just three days left.

The items offered tend toward signed books — you might find a beloved author’s books available, if you browse the listings.

But here are some notable exceptions:

Katherine Kerr will Tuckerize YOU!  As a villain.   You know you always wanted to be a villain.  (Don’t know what “Tuckerize” means?  Read this.)

Yep, you can be immortalized (I first accidentally typed that as “immoralized, which is perhaps appropriate, seeing that you’d be a villain) in Kerr’s next Deverry novel, Sword of Fire.  When will you get a chance like this again?  Without actually turning to evil in real life, that is.  You don’t want to do that.

Prints of the ebook covers for Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson’s Wheel of Time series.

Like this:

 

Manuscript critiques!  Including Yoon Ha Lee’s offer to read and critique your entire novel. 

And there’s always custom chocolate from Dark Matter Chocolate Laboratory.

And your money goes to a good cause — so what’s to lose?

 

In other news:  I’m hunkered down especially hard this week, due to being up next for my writer’s group which is meeting on the 14th.  Yeah.  Not much time… so, back to it.

 

Seen on the sidewalk, as I walked home from the Genrettes meeting last week.