Awake at 3:00 a.m. Couldn’t get back to sleep so dragged the laptop into the bedroom (yeah: bad! but the surgical incisions feel a lot better when I recline to work).
Packaged a proposal for the Boob Book, intended for an agent who looks promising and so, I hope, will consider working with me. Started merging the various documents and realized…helle’s belles! No chapter outline!
Dayum. So had to drop everything and write that. Hope it doesn’t look too careless or off-the-cuff. Finally got the whole mound together, attached it to a cover e-mail, and hit “send.”
By then it was light out. Dogs insisted on getting off the bed and racing around and being fed.
Dogs off, dogs fed, back door open for them to go out and the mosquitoes to come in. Back to the bed-desk.
Started grading papers. Only a few remain to be read, but one of my best students is running late. I’d given her some leeway…but of course worry that she may not get the thing in on time. She’ll pass the course anyway, even if she turns in nothing. But…she’s an A+ student and I would like not to send her away with a C. Or worse.
Two very well written papers arrived. That was cheering. One reasonably well written paper came in from a student who couldn’t write hir way out of a paper bag if hir life depended on it: i.e., said paper was written reasonably well by someone s/he hired. Another couple of papers: painful to read. Make that agonizing.
In-house for The Copyeditor’s Desk: a lengthy introduction for a book under contract and two reviews for our journal client. Tina had already read and formatted the reviews, so all I had to do was read behind her. The introduction…we’d read it before, but she found new stuff; I found new stuff; it got some tidying. AND damned Wyrd has decided to default to Roman numerals for the end-notes.
This is a known issue for Wyrd 2007, 2008, and 2010 for Mac…and apparently — far as I could tell from a relatively quick Web search — one that effing Microsoft has elected to ignore. And it is a gigantic PITA.
Naturally Wyrd crashed (AGAIN) just as I was wrapping up the intro…try to fix ONE character in the effing end-notes and you take the whole goddamn program down.
Little was lost; files I’ve been working on for the past several days (which were open because I don’t want to have to track them down in the intricacies of my file architecture) recovered themselves, and only one edit in the introduction disappeared.
I should be happy that only my time was wasted, hm?
Worked a little on formatting and writing “Our Story So Far” blurbs for the Fire-Rider series.
A prospective writer for Camptown Races Press inquired about our contract.
Ahem. Contract?
So as soon as I shoveled the paying work off the virtual desk, I had to come up with one of those. It actually looks pretty good, IMHO. Fortunately one chapter of my book The Essential Feature covered publishing contracts and was vetted by an intellectual property lawyer.
Now I have about 20 minutes before I’ve got to traipse the car to Costco AGAIN to get the car’s tires changed and be sheared to the tune of $400. I figure it’ll take an hour or two for them to do that, so I’ll take the laptop over there and write p0rn while sitting in their air-conditioned shop.
One never knows these days, does one? Just think of it. That little old lady sitting next to you in the tire shop or the dentist’s office, tapping away on her dainty laptop, just may be writing kink… 😀
I will never be able to look the same again at a little old lady with a laptop.
Wow! You’re amazing–I don’t know how you manage to get it all done, and with such aplomb. A friend of mine once said she felt like a duck-serene on the water’s surface, paddling frantically away underneath.
I will certainly carry around the image of the nice older lady seated next to me in a random place, busily writing smut, for the next few days. Good one!