Month: August 2010

My son River’s exam under anesthesia last Friday went beautifully. His glaucoma hasn’t gotten worse at all, even though his last surgery was in 2008. Basically the best possible outcome. Yay! He wasn’t under long, so he woke up quickly, and wasn’t that groggy afterward. Apart from dilated pupils and light sensitivity, he was his old self again by late afternoon. He gets another check-up in 5 or 6 months, and they’re going to see if they can check him without putting him under. He might be old enough to deal with a strange guy poking at his eyes without freaking out.

Yesterday I spent about 11.5 hours at work, finishing up the September Steampunk issue of A Certain Magazine. Well, I wasn’t alone; my co-workers were there too. As was my child, known to twitter readers everywhere as Officebaby. It was a perfect storm of lousy timing: his preschool is closed for teacher prep week, and because his mom’s leaving town today, she had to go into her office yesterday to get some necessary work done, and couldn’t watch the kid.

I was, frankly, pretty worried about getting all the million end-of-issue things done with the kid there — but he was a perfect angel and a trouper. My managing editor’s ten-year-old daughter came in to do kid-watching duty, and played with him all day long. She even stayed in with him while he napped until he fell asleep. (And proceeded to sleep for about 3 hours — that was also very helpful!) When it became clear I was going to be at work past my son’s bedtime doing the final prep on the issue, my editor-in-chief gave the kid a ride home. The issue turned out great. It might be the coolest-looking of any of our special issues.

As a reward for being so good yesterday, River gets to do whatever he wants today. (He votes playground, ice cream, waterfight!) It’s the first truly hot day I’ve had off work all summer, but his doctor says he can’t go swimming because of his recent ear infection. We can play waterguns though! Should be a nice day.

But kind of a lonely week. My wife is soon off to New York for the wedding of a dear friend, and won’t be back for several days. We couldn’t really afford for both of us to go, and since my wife is the one in the wedding party, she wins. So I’ll be solo parenting for a while. Fortunately my mother-in-law will be in town later this week, so she’ll help some.

And, as recompense for my time spent solo parenting, my wife is letting me slip away for a rather long weekend over Labor Day. I’ll be going down to L.A. to stay with a friend for a few days on a sort of mini writing retreat, with the goal of getting ludicrous quantities of work finished on the novel I am (or, should be) writing. I’ve also got a couple of stories to write.

My serialization of Broken Mirrors was a huge success. I wrote a postmorten post with various details and final thoughts if you’re interested. The Kindle version should be available for sale in a day or two. I’ll be sending out fundraiser prizes over the next couple of months. For many of the prizewinners I need to wait until I get my finished copies, and get the chapbook printed (and *cough cough* written), so most prizes will go out in late September and October, probably. But all will ship by year’s end, as promised. It was a great adventure. Thanks to everyone who donated, read, and/or told their friends.

I’d catch you up on all the excitement in my life, but there’s not much: spent most of last weekend either having a sick kid or being sick myself. Took Monday off work for a festival of sleeping and healing that was mostly successful. I thought I was still sick on Tuesday, until it dawned on me around noon that I hadn’t actually eaten in about 24 hours. After consuming food I felt much better. Today I’m still kind of headachey and generally out-of-it, but I think that’s mostly leftover dehydration. Hope so, anyway.

Pretty much all I did in my conscious moments was read: Ian Rankin’s collection A Good Hanging, which was enjoyable, especially “Sunday”. I also read All Clear by Connie Willis, which concludes the big story she began in Blackout, though I sort of wish I’d re-read the first volume before diving in to the conclusion. It took me a while to remember what was happening in the various time periods covered, but I got up to speed eventually. She does some very cool and audacious stuff.

Yesterday, as I was feeling better, I took River over to Habitot, where he played with rocket ships and splashed water and painted and pretended to grocery shop and cook and did all the other fun stuff on offer there. Afterward we went to a diner for lunch — that was the point where I realized I was dizzy from lack of food — and he sat beside me in the booth. He watched people go by out the window and yelled “Hi people! I eating dinner!” He’s been a really sweet, cute, darling kid lately. We played a lot in the yard in the afternoon, too — digging in the dirt, which we call “Archaeology,” as we excavate cool rocks and such. Having a yard is so awesome. I don’t know how we managed for so long with a toddler in a fourth-floor apartment.

I have so much work to do that I can’t really afford to lose several days to illness, but that’s the way it goes. Just means I have to write more this weekend. At least it keeps me from being bored…

As I write this, I am enjoying a small slice of heaven:

A cup of freshly-brewed Blue Bottle coffee.

A fresh-baked sweet corn muffin (which my two-year-old helped me bake — he’s good at stirring).

A dab of honey butter for the muffin.

Weekends are good.

It’s been an extremely social week, especially by my hermitlike standards. Had a great afternoon out and then dinner on Tuesday with my wonderful agent Ginger, who took my wife Heather and I to Limon, one of our favorite restaurants. Truffle mac and cheese oh my yum.

On Wednesday Heather and my boss and I all went up to Sonoma to have dinner at the indescribably lovely home of a certain poet (and former head of a major arts institution) with whom I’ve corresponded for years but had never met. A couple of prominent science fiction writers of my acquaintance were there, along with other fascinating people. (Afterward my wife noted that, given the people we’d met at the barbecue, we were now only a single degree of separation away from both George W. Bush and Jorge Luis Borges…)

Last night I had dinner with my producer friend Anne, who has the film/TV option for the Marla Mason series. There are no developments I can report, but she has many interesting irons in the fire. It was a pleasure to see her, too, as always, even if the service at the restaurant was so bad it was literally comical. (Like, order a vodka martini with a lemon twist and get gin with olives in it kind of bad. I stuck with beer — it’s hard to screw up beer. Even if you get the wrong beer, it’s still beer.)

I enjoyed every one of those outings, but my introvert tendencies are nevertheless happy that I’ve got no particular plans for the weekend besides writing, and can pretty much stay home.

There are only two weeks left before Broken Mirrors is over. Sadness! The last chapter goes up on August 16, and I’ll stop giving prizes for donations after August 22. (After that I’ll still happily take your money — you just won’t get signed books or prints or chapbooks or bookmarks or artwork or any of the other goodies.) The Kindle edition should go up right after the serialization is done, with other e-book formats to follow (I hope). And the print edition will be along later this fall. Whee!