Musings

WisCon’s respite page has been updated to show the “living room” panel I’m doing!

http://sf3.org/wiscon/respite/lr.html

What questions would each of you ask if you were in the audience? I want to anticipate what the most common ones might be so that I won’t stumble over my answers.

I turned down a proofread yesterday. I don’t take proofreads anymore because they don’t pay as well as copyediting jobs. I’m also an incredibly slow proofreader and find it completely impossible to manage the ten book pages per hour that publishers expect from you. I honestly don’t know how people do that! When I started out freelancing and was taking proofreads a lot, I ended up making a woefully low wage for the amount of work I could charge for.

I’m not even sure what book I turned down.

Then today I turned down a copyedit on a romance by Cherry Adair. I have actually enjoyed some of the romances I’ve taken–I really love Gaelen Foley and have requested to have all her books–but Evan is still unpredictable enough that I worry about being able to make a deadline.

I was a good girl and called Tom Doherty today. I left a message on his voice mail saying that the Gears had asked me to call him and that they wanted me to copyedit their Tor books. We’ll see if he calls back, but now I can at least write the Gears and tell them I did it. :-)

Well, I had on a high-cut shirt the other day, and my daughter came up to me and patted my stomach and said, “Mom, your tummy is too fat.”

And my husband said, “Blaine, that’s not nice. Mommy just had a baby!”

And I’m sure the poor, clueless guy has absolutely no idea that that was not the correct response. ;-)

(And yeah, I know I’m not fat. I am, however, a full twenty pounds heavier than I was before I had Blaine. Man, I must’ve been a stick!)

Well, I’ve been bad and haven’t written since I subbed the story to SH. I did, however, sub a story to Ideomancer for the first time. They have an incredibly beautiful and well-done site, and I’ll be excited if they accept the story. (I wrote myself into a really odd little niche with it–dark, erotic science fiction.)

And I baked chocolate chip cookies with my little girl today–her favorite activity. :-)

Well, I really feel pretty silly about posting because I’ve done nothing exciting the last few days. I’ve been hanging out with my little girl, mainly. She’s been needing some extra attention lately, since so much of my time is taken up with the baby.

I’ve critted a few stories on the Online Writing Workshop. There are some nice ones there! And I made hotel reservations for WorldCon, even though I’m not positive I’ll go this year. I’m already attending WisCon, and I hate being away from the baby so much. I’ve vaguely considered taking him with me rather than leaving him with Bill. We’ll see.

I subbed the zombie unicorn in space story to SH today. I think one of the editors was making mention on his blog of the stories this morning, though mine hadn’t been sent yet at that point.

I’m truly happy to have written that story! It taught me something very important about writing: that I can write without making everything perfect *as I go*. My copyediting background too often causes me to get hung up when writing, because I drive myself crazy with fact-checking and second-guessing. It was wonderful to write something that I could relax over, and I really think it turned out well. And once it was finished, I went back and nitpicked myself then. :-)

And I have to admit to being pretty proud to have pulled off a hard science fiction zombie unicorn story….

Wow! I wrote today! I’m so impressed with myself! And I really like the story, too!

It’s a zombie unicorn in space story. :-) Some of the people in my workshop are doing them as an April Fool’s joke for the folks at SH. I’m enormously pleased with myself for writing, though, and the idea was a lot of fun to work with.