Mon, 29 Dec 2003
Things that come in my postbag
Well, the mail has resumed normal service after the Christmas
glut. And boy, did I receive an interesting assortment!
Credit card statements (naturally)
A couple of late Christmas cards (ditto)
An invoice from the Inland Revenue for next year's income
tax (hollow laughter)
An author copy of New
Voices in Science Fiction,
a short story collection I've got half a story in (two weeks
after I gave up hope, cracked, and bought my own copy)
An advance proof copy of Bruce Sterling's next novel, for
comment (which I'm really looking forward to)
Three copies of the dust jacket for "Iron Sunrise"
(they're dropping the definite article from in front of it --
oh, and apparently if
the cover doesn't look like I imagined it would,
I must
now do my best to bring Western Civilization to a screeching
halt: thanks for the tip, Teresa!)
A summons for High Court jury service
The bills aren't a problem -- but the jury service falls right in the middle
of next month's planned writing death-march. See, I've got this novel
that is due in at Tor either December 31st, or as soon as it's
written, whichever comes first. (Let's be fair: due to the previous
novel running behind schedule -- the publisher decided at a rather
late stage that they wanted it splitting into two volumes -- I've
got an extension. But I don't
like extensions, I like hitting deadlines: and the
original deadline is now 48 hours away and closing.)
I've spent the Christmas period tooling up this enormous,
tightly-planned outline, which is now ready
to go. I've got a bluetooth keyboard, so I don't break the
laptop, and I've got a truck-load of soft drinks and snacks
sitting on the mezzanine, and a spare set of anti-RSI gloves,
and about 20,000 words of off-cuts from the previous draft
(back when I was writing a 250,000 word novel instead of a
100,000 word book),
and, well, I'm generally pumped and ready for action.
As of January 2nd (one must respect Hogmanay, after
all) I was planning on getting down to work and beating NaNoWrMo by a factor of
two. But trying to do all that while concurrently sitting on a
jury is a bit ... hmm.
Hmm ... again.
Like I said, it's interesting what comes in my
post-bag. I just hope I can get this all sorted out in time.
[ Discuss
writing ]
posted at: 12:35 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry
|