Vision is almost done

It's good to be closer to done, especially since I'm behind on other things. New class to post tomorrow, so I have to get that done. And I still have 105 pages of edits to type in for Farstep Station. And writing. I need to write stuff.

I would really like to get away for the day, but that's not going to happen. In fact, I don't see going anywhere as an option at all until the end of May. It's going to be a long few weeks.

But stories are doing well, so I can't -- well shouldn't -- complain.

It's Saturday, though. For some reason I keep thinking odd things like I should have weekends off. Don't worry.... it will pass.

Thunk

Cute Willow

She's sitting on the back of my chair right now, which I did not expect. Usually it's Wind there, but he's where Pip usually is. Pips where Cricket sits, and Cricket is on the window ledge where Willow sits.

I get the feeling it's going to be one of those days.

I've started out with a bad ear ache, too. Hard to concentrate on anything, especially since the pain has worked up into my jaw and the ear is swollen closed. I so love spring. And it's been too cold to even go walking, so I don't know how this happened. I watched bands of snow heading our way last night, but I went to bed before it hit (if it did) and there was none on the ground this morning. It was 33f out when I got up, though.

Now, on the good news, writing is going very well. I'm over half way done with Kinship, which is sitting at about 58k right now. I have just about everything done for Vision except putting it together.

(Zelda is now standing on my mouse pad. Cats, cats everwhere! That's five out of the seven!)

I have to type in the corrections to Farstep Station. I have the hand editing done, but I've not started that part. I need to get started on it today. The book is due in May. The sooner I get it in to them, the better.

And besides, the publisher of Ada Nish Pura wants to get going on it again in May. So the more 'I have to get this done' stuff I can get out of the way, the better.

Do I have any real point in posting this this afternoon? Not really. I'm trying to get my fingers used to typing today (they seem to be rebelling for some reason), and I had that cute Willow picture, so why not?

I've been using my LJ to post updates on my work during the day. It's been a strange help, keeping me going so that I can post the next update. I'm hoping it will get me through at least 3k today. The fever and ear ache is annoying me, though.

Tea. Tea sounds good.

I think I'll maybe feed the cats first, though. See if I can't clear a little space for me to work....

New snippet post

I'm not certain if anyone realizes that I do snippets on another blog. LOL. (I said I was crazy with these things, right?)

I just posted a short first draft snippet from Kinship.

You can find it here:

http://zettesnano04.blogspot.com/

(Amusing. I just realized the blog above is the writing with no photography, and the other one is the photography with no writing, and this one is both.)

Okay, yes, I am crazy

(This is my third picture for this post. I kept finding I had used the previous ones! Well, this is out of my zoo collection, and I know I haven't used anything from there in a while!)

Lately I've been playing around a lot with various journals, blogs, LiveJournals. I have been devoting my new LJ to tracking my writing and other work, and how long it takes me to get specific jobs done. And at what point in the day I burn out on trying to get too much done. It's been interesting -- well, from my point of view. The posts are boring as hell.

Tonight I started a new blog called Visions of Now which I intend to be only for photography and occasional digital art. The most writing it will get is an occasional haiku.

I realized that I need some stuff outside of writing. I love photography, but I tend to let it slip off into 'oh grab something for the journal' realms. A day or so ago I found the Photo Friday challenge, and I realized it would be fun. (Link on the Visions of Now blog) It would be a new kind of challenge for me. One that does not require that I write or edit anything.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Well, at least it does right now at 1 AM. In a few days I may get wise and delete everything.

Writing, by the way, is going along just fine. Getting lots done. Just remembered I have some editing to do tonight, though, so I had better get to that now!

Happy Kitty Days!

Kwi


Zelda

These are my two oldest cats. They came into the house 15 years ago on this day -- just little furry things, along with their late brother Kincaid. They've been very good cats. I'll try to get a couple pictures of them today and post them. And I think I'll talk Russ into getting them some fish if he has time. He's been very busy this last week, and I think it's going to keep going through the weekend at the very least.

Anyway, happy kitty day!

Oh, and if I forget, Gracie the Wonder Dog will have been with us for 11 years on the 27th.


I'm getting quite a bit of writing done -- 4k a day for several days now. Unfortunately, it's not on anything that I can really use right now. (grin) But I am enjoying the work, and I'm also editing quite a bit of Farstep Station -- the last time through for it. Kinship is the one that's going so well. I'm not unhappy with that. I have to get it done at some point anyway!

I've also been taking walks every day now that the weather is nice (more or less). I have to admit that I live in the most boring area in the world for walks. I drag my camera out with me, of course, and I have managed a couple flower shots and a few birds and squirrels, but nothing very exciting. I wish I lived closer to the edge of town and could just go walking out on the dirt roads. I used to love to do that when I lived in areas where it was possible.

It would be nice if I had something exciting to report. I think that's going to have to wait for another day. I'm going to go spend time with the kitty guys.

Long day, but good!

Worn out Pip!

I did quite a bit of writing today and I'm happy. I'm always happy when writing works. I'm really very easy to please. (grin)

My wonderful husband also brought me home a nice bannana split... which I didn't need, but really enjoyed. (grin)

I shared with Pip and the other cats. A little.

On news stuff....

I was surprised to find that they had named a Pope so quickly. Another Benedict... interesting. I suspect that this does show a step back in reactions. Not a surprise. The Catholic Church has never been exactly out in the forefront of change.

And, of course, it's also time for all the rude people to come out and attack others for their religious beliefs. Not a surprise there, either. Of course the same people expect respect for anything they believe or say.

I come from a strong Roman Catholic Irish Family, complete with nuns and priests. I am not Catholic. I'm not even Christian.

But I respect that others have a heartfelt belief in their religion, whatever it might be. It's unfortunate that we live in a world where rude is pandered to, and attacking people for everything from their religion to where they work (or what they write) is considered brave and intelligent by others.

Still, anyway... I'm quite happy with my writing. I'm going to go watch the lovely storm for a while!

Can I work now?

Rainy day reflections in Sioux City

Yesterday was a frustrating day. I shouldn't feel that way, but still....

I got a lot of work done. All the contracts went out for the next issue of Vision. (Oh, and for the rest of you, the contracts and checks went out a few days ago, too. My apologies for being late, but it couldn't be helped on several levels. I am caught up now, though!)

Getting the Vision stuff done was great. But, as always, it took hours. I had to do the database, the contract merge, the emails....

But I got it done.

And then, unexpectedly, we had company. We went out to dinner. By the time we got back, it was very late.

I hadn't done any writing yet.

I managed to get a little over 1000 words done, finally. Much of it is in notes for Oak and Ash which I still need to research.

Today I've had a bunch of other things that needed to get done. And now, here I am trying to get to my writing. Russ may be home at any time. Or he may not. I seem to remember that this was the first day where he was going to have some really busy stuff going on each night.

I have other things I really need to get done, too. Lots of things for other people.

I would like to write.

Stupid children

There are stupid children in the world (and never mind their age, they are children). One of them just spent about an hour and a half doing her best to get kicked out of the FM chat. It worked, too.

Some people are obviously trolls. Who knows that stupidity in their little brains brings them joy at annoying others, but that's all they get out of their pathetic useless lives. This one is no doubt already looking for someone else to annoy. She (or maybe he) obviously doesn't have anything else in life. You have to feel sorry for them.

Though not sorry enough to let them bother the others in chat. (grin)

Dancer is done!

Congratulations to Sheila-Lynn Viehl for her showing on the USA best seller list! I remember being in chat with her when she was trying to decide between writing (as I recall) a fantasy series or a vampire series. I said go with the vampires because they were popular right now, and as fast as she could get things out, she could take advantage of it.

So, see, everyone should listen to me.

As if I really had anything to do with it. (grin)

In my 'Yay' news -- Dancer is done, including a lot of notes for the rewrite, which will not happen for several months. I had a couple insights right there at the end, including some odd stuff about doing collections of two stories for a few of the Devlin books, including Dancer (with Autumn Skies as the second story). So instead of trying to find new ways to expand Dancer for the third or fourth time, what I really need to do is tighten it up to about 50k and do the same with Autumn Skies, which suffers from some of the same problem. And remind myself that some stories are just certain lengths and that's what they are meant to be. Then I'll put the two together. They are the first two Devlin's Team stories, and I think they'd make a nice collection. Medusan Mutation is a full book after that, but then Missing Persons and Aldebaran Stopover could go together. There are at least three others (all full books): Legend, Wolf Pack, Honor. Last year I wrote a short story that I had intended to be the first of four, giving all of the team's members a story off by themselves, but I didn't get more than the first one completed. I liked it, though. Maybe one or two other novels in there that I can't remember. And there are at least three more that I would like to write in the series: That Which is Holy, Treason, Forest.

This is my first actually finished novel of the year, which is pretty pathetic for me. But at least it's something.

My new schedule seems to be helping out, even if I'm not sticking to it as well as I would hope. At least it saw me this far, which is better than anything else has done so far.

Other things? Right now there is nothing else going on around here. The weather is good. I've gone walking the last two days. Russ is very busy and going to be busier. I need to get caught up on other things now that I have Dancer done, and all I really want to do is write some more. Which is good. I'll turn that into edits for a while and work on Glory. That story is going very well, too. I'm going to be putting it out this month, I think. Yay!

And that's about it. I'm happy to have Dancer done and finally feel like I'm making progress on something. Right now, though, I have to go do some other work!

Well, that certainly put me behind....

I went to a small local convention this weekend. I didn't even know it was going on until the day before, but I went and printed up some flyers and visited with Julie Czerneda and her husband Roger and met Rhondi Vilott Salsitz who writes under so many names and has so much material out that I'm going to have to beg a list from someone just to get it straight.

I had a lovely time, but it did put me behind just at a time when I was starting to get caught up again.

But here it is, Sunday, and the start of a new week. I can start over on my schedule and see what I can get done this time. It would be interesting if I could make it through a full week without the Internet going down -- which messes up my work big time since so much of what I do is Internet related -- or something outside the list doesn't turn up to take my attention. So far I'm doing all right. I have the 2YN stuff very nearly ready to go up. That's week 67 for the first group and week 15 for the second group. That means only 37 more classes to write. A good part of that is going to be editing-related. I think I'll try to start that section on the first week of May. Then there's the whole query/synopsis and submission package stuff, along with looking for markets/agents. I think I'll work in a week or two of feedback at the end. I need, in fact, to look over my list for the last of the classes and make certain I have everything lined out the way I want to do it.

I've written about 150k for the class so far. I expect that it will be over 200k by the time I'm done. Some of it is repetitious. I keep finding spots where something needs to be addressed again (or at least I think so), and I work it back in. By year three I'm going to have all the material sorted out a bit better, too, I think. It will be interesting to be to a year where I'm not writing the stuff for either group.

I am behind on the reviews of the first three chapters, though. I'm sorry about that. I hope to get caught up soon. I think my new schedule (if I get a full week with it) is going to help.

My writing word count keeps falling a bit short, too. I need to do something about that, of course. Today I worked on Dancer. I'm still having trouble with the opening to Farstep Station, but I think I finally have part of the trouble worked out in my mind. I just need to see how to work it out on paper. I'm going to have to concentrate on it soon. I have no real choice. I'm going to print out the work and go over it. I'm just very low on paper right now. Ack.

Welcome to Monday

Not a particularly good Monday, but I'm sure things will all work out. Started off with what appears to be an email misunderstanding and I think that's going to cleared up with no real problems. Then I spent all the rest of the day working on DTF stuff -- rejections, updates to the site, material going out to the copyeditors. Our second book should be released soon.

Russ is going to be late getting home, too. He wants to go out, and I don't know if I really feel up to it. Nothing sounds particularly good tonight.

And I got... a really odd email. Someone explaining to me the 'trick' for running a site like FM. It is to create a number of alter egos -- and have the mods do it too -- so that if anyone argues, there can be a whole horde of people to agree with us. She said this was how they did things at a different website and it helped with both the number of members at the site and in having everyone do what they wanted. They could post things and have lots of people jump in to agree so that no one really had a chance to argue about site changes or anything like that. LOL. As far as I can tell, the more people you have agree the more likely you are to draw people who will argue just to argue. You have to wonder if this site has any real people there or not. Let's see -- if they had ten mods, and each of the mods created five 'people' -- look, fifty regulars on the site who often post and keep everything heading in one direction. That really would skew things.

Sorry, no. We don't play those games at FM. If I'm going to make a change I think really needs to be done, I'll make it. The Mods and I often discuss improvements and changes, and problems, but it is my decision. I don't make changes on a whim, and I know that some people are going to disagree. People disagree over everything. Get used to it. If you can't handle it, then running a site really isn't for you. If all you want to do is tell people how it should be, a blog or something like that is far better.

I've been experimenting with a change in my zoo site again. LOL. It's like the never ending project. I think the new one will be brighter and easier to navigate. And easier to update, for that matter!

And that's it for me. I need to get some writing done, but I'm in such a poor mood that I've even been cleaning house. Never a good sign. (grin)

April?

Lost in the weeds....

That's somewhat how I feel right now. I'm really not doing badly, just a little lost in what I should do next. Hold it! I've got a schedule!

(Checks through her papers to find the printout)

Ah! Zette Writing Day. Well screw the rest of this stuff, then.

I'd like to see Dancer hit 46-47k today. I'd really like to see it hit 50k, but that's not going to happen. I also have some writing to do on the Week 66 class. And more editing on Glory.

So time to work!