The Grind

September 18

It's been a rough couple of days, peeps. Tuesday I worked flat-out all day long finishing the October issue of A Certain Magazine, complete with a last-minute crisis, just to add a little extra stress. All this on top of some bad news Heather received yesterday morning; I won't get into specifics, since she wants to write about it, but I will say that it's rather costly and not life-threatening, and we're going to have to tighten our belts a little to deal with it. We'll get by, but we'll have to cut back on, heh, all the lobster dinners and limousines and chartered airplane flights and champagne brunches and shit we usually have around the Pratt-Shaw household.

Today was pleasant at work, mostly, though shortly after 5 o'clock we found out one of the disks we'd given the printer was corrupted, so I had to e-mail them some enormous attachments, which took objectively forever -- until after 6:00. I was all alone in the office for an hour, watching the status bar in the outbox crawl along... Anyway, that pretty much blew apart my plans for the evening, so I skipped the gym. Heather, who's rather stressed, decided to skip, too, and we just hung out at the house, eating french bread and olive oil, watching the rather abysmal premiere of The Twilight Zone (I do like Jason Alexander, though, and he did well in the painfully hackneyed and cliché-ridden segment about Death).

I've gotten good mail, at least -- I'm now a genuine member of the SFWA. Whee! Now I won't have to depend on Greg and Mike to sneak me into the parties... and I get the Bulletin and The Forum (I found out two of my stories have received Nebula recs! Wowzers!), and the secret decoder ring, and I can recommend and vote on the Nebulas, and so forth. Tonight I got my copy of Tales of the Lucky Nickel by Ken Rand, which looks cool... I'm increasingly interested in small-press stuff.

I finished reading Night Watch by Pratchett today, and it's good; one of his best, I think.

I haven't done any writing for the past two days, unfortunately. Tomorrow night will likely be spent working on reviews... I'll work on my new story this weekend, as much as possible, since I need to catch up on Star*Line and various other things, too. No rest for me! Though we'll be taking a vacation soon, soon, once Heather figures out the dates she can take off... Mmm, I need that so much...

So I have no Dare news to report, but Sean does:

Finished the first draft of Special Delivery this evening. The story came out at a tad under 4000 words. Tomorrow, I tackle the rest of the Moe story. Must get over this feeling of being behind...

Heh. I'm the one being left behind, as far as that goes. But once I catch up on all the life-stuff that got postponed due to novel-bingeing, I should be better...

Words written since February 1, 2002: 165,400

Words written since last entry:
I know. Quit looking at me like that.

Send me goat sounds.

Tim Pratt
P.O. Box 13222
Berkeley, CA 94712-4222

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