Is anything more fun than waiting on the phone for tech support? I'm glad I don't work in tech support. They must be terribly harried people, and yet they're usually pretty civil, if not always helpful. I'm surly even on my good days.

Being back at work is no fun. My fellow admin is out of the country on vacation, so I'm handling everything. There's zillions of little details to deal with as the company gets ready to move. Bleah. Why can't I be paid handsomely to sit around and surf the net, hmmm?

I slept pretty well last night, but woke up with a sniffly nose and stuffed-up head around 6 a.m. I couldn't get back to sleep, and I felt pretty alert, if phlegmy, so I just got up. I had a leisurely morning. Made a pot of coffee, took a long shower, got bagels for me and Meg (who was still snuggle-sleeping) as soon as the sun came up a little. Watched the traffic on the news, somewhat mesmerized by the winding string of headlights moving in the dark. I'm glad I don't have a bay-area commute.

I came to work an hour early, both to make up some of the time I missed last week and to get a jump on my pages-long task list. I'm somewhat caught up now, and determined to be unstressed. This job should not have the power to make me feel frazzled.

Last night I played Scrabble with Meg. I was joyously trouncing her for a while, but then she came from behind and destroyed me. I found myself at the end of the game with four I's, an N, and a useless Q. She consistently beats me at Scrabble. What kind of a wordsmith am I?

A live human tech supporter on the line! I'll be back.

*******

Whee! It's later. What a mad, spike-covered hamster wheel today is turning out to be. I'm taking a ten-minute break to scarf some lasagna and write a little bit here, as extravagant half-hour lunch breaks are a thing of the Pleistocene past... Nine and a half hours is just too long to work at this kind of job. It's too long to do just about any one thing, actually.

*******

I wrote a really nasty horror story a long time ago. It's possibly the most disturbing and offensive piece of fiction I've ever written, and I think it accomplishes exactly what I intend it to. It's not a piece of slasher trash, either; there's a point to the thing, even if it is an especially ugly and brutal point. This story garnered me one of my first personal rejections. Gordon Van Gelder rejected the tale in its first incarnation a couple of years ago, saying that it had some very effective shocks but that he thought it didn't have any substance behind those shocks. That bothered me, because I didn't intend it as a piece of gruesome gratuitousness. GVG's comments prompted me to look it over and rewrite it with a rather different ending.

Brian, my old housemate and one of my writing's biggest fans, read both versions. He told me that the second version was even more disturbing than the first, though I removed a lot of the more explicit, graphic horror. That pleased me greatly. I wanted it to be more disturbing, without quite so much shock and gore.

I'm going to look that story over, with an eye toward revising it and sending it out again (it hasn't gone anywhere in a couple of years). If I manage to sell it, I'll tell you guys about it...

*******

Only one hour to go. Then I get to see Meg, and frolic, and stop thinking about my job.

I think I'll go crazy if I can't make a living as a writer someday. All this other stuff is just a waste of time! To give up a solid third of my day doing stuff that doesn't matter to me at all! How absurd!

Y'all best step back. My rage is blinding on this subject.

No recent sign of my burgeoning full-time writing career, though. It's already 3 days into the new year and I don't have any sales yet. :( I got an ugly form rejection from Asimov's yesterday. Someday I'll get hit by a truck and they'll all be sorry they didn't recognize my genius while I still lived...

Okay, home now. I got through the day. Gotta go play with Meg now.