Week of August 8-14 (belated)

Three rejections, no acceptances, one "maybe; I'm thinking hard about it."

markgritter and I are back from Grand Rapids safe and sound. I worked on Zodiac House pretty well there on the first few days, and I took today off like a good Mrissa is supposed to do. All novels and no play makes Mrissa something something. But I like the way ZH is falling together in my head. I like the things I'm doing with it, and I like the siblings who are the main characters, and I like the fact that it is for children (=SHORT) and can be contained in my head without making me feel like I swallowed a glacier (which is how the Not The Moose Books, Thermionic Night and Sampo, have been -- though oddly Midnight Sun Rising feels much more straightforward -- perhaps this is because I've only written 40K on it). I think when I'm done with the draft of Sampo and am revising the living hell out of it and Thermionic Night, I will go into some sort of writing...umm...thinger...and emerge with ZH the way I did with The Worldbuilders. Only better, because I know how to write gooder now.

I have still more to say than I did when I was kite-flying, but I'm mentally and physically tired, so it's going to wait again. This morning was not a good time. I woke up with the bed spinning, and this was not a feature the hotel provided. Wheeee. Stupid dizziness. It's mostly gone now, except it's more pronounced as I get tired. Bah. I'm drinking water, on the theory that it can't hurt. (I suppose it could. But the odds are on my side.) I'll unpack tomorrow, mentally and physically.

Time

Can I call time? I'd like to. I'd like to get to stop the clock for a week or so and let it be August 21 two Saturdays from now instead of the very next time it's Saturday.

Here's the thing about it: there are the things I have time for and the things I don't have time for. That's simple enough in theory, though not so well-divided in practice. Much of my fussing is directed at sorting these things out.

Then there are the things I don't have time not to do and the things I have the time not to do. This is even worse. I don't have time, for example, not to get together with porphyrin for coffee or dinner or what have you. I may think I don't have time to see her, but if I don't, I will be much crankier, less efficient, and generally worse off. Contrariwise, I have the time not to eat out of boxes all the time or make my family do the same. Sometimes this means I spend more time cooking than I strictly have to, and I'm still defining the boundaries of "all the time." But I have room in my life to sacrifice a little stirring-free reading time or leave a few weeds in the garden so that we have decent meals of whose ingredients I am reasonably certain.

I feel reasonably certain that I'll have it all sorted out by the time I'm, oh, 126 or so. Only by then I'll have more and different people and concerns, so it'll all be moot anyway.

I also feel reasonably certain that somewhere around 10:00 on September 10th, I will be out of the summer set of Stuff What Needs Doing, because if Em and Aaron aren't married by then, it certainly won't be my fault, and I will wash my hands of them entirely, and of the rest of it as well. The World will be Conned. Michelle and Scott will also be wed or I will know the reason why not. Et-bloody-cetera. There are some things I'd like to do this fall, but the overwhelming string of stuffness will be mostly internal instead of mostly external. And hurrah for that.

Right this very now I don't have time not to sleep. Alas.