Well, I was bad and now…

Well, I was bad and now I'm paying the price. Instead of going to bed at 9 like a good girl last night, I started talking to David (houseguest). He showed me a couple of guitar chords (I know now how to play C (extremely painful for my small hand), E minor and D (at least I knew last night. Not sure if I remember them now). Must build up calluses. Ouch ouch ouch. Somehow we started playing and singing, going through my sheet music and trying to find pieces we both knew (hard!); ending up with some Simon and Garfunkle. With the aid of a little piano (extremely badly tuned), we managed to eventually do creditable renditions of The Boxer and Cecilia (both of which I love). Ian came in somewhere along there and sang along; he has a nice voice, trained. My voice isn't bad, but I have a horrible tendency to just wander off key. It's not that I can't hear it...it's that I can hear too much? I'm okay with just a piano melody line accompanying me. But hearing chords on the guitar, I wander off into the other notes in the chord. Sigh. Practice and care, I suppose. At any rate, it was fun; it's been far too long since I've really sung. But I stayed up 'til at least 11:30 and now I know why that's a bad idea.

Woke up at 5 by Roshani's phone call exhausted and coughing. Stumbled back to bed, where I coughed my way back to sleep. Slept myself out until 8:30, and now I am no longer exhausted, but still have a very sore throat and pounding head (which I will soon go take some ibuprofen for). If I'm going to run myself ragged this semester, I clearly need to take care of myself in other ways. Lots of soup and vitamins and juice. That sort of thing.

So this morning, I think I start revising "Deep with Sea". Got to get through a bit of e-mail first, do some household things and so on. It's nice that I have no classes on Thursdays...I can shift the writing schedule down some without too much trouble. (To give you some idea on the crits so far: one really liked the characterization in the new revisions and had few line edits, one pointed out some minor but important thematic concerns which can probably be easily fixed, and one really preferred the earlier version. Meep. The earlier version did, in some sense, have more interesting characterization -- but they were characters that I didn't really understand, and I don't think I could write them properly, believably. I think I'm going to stick with this version. The great usefulness of crits is that they challenge your preconceptions about your work -- they make you look at a part and say, 'do I really want that there?' and if you do, then you get to figure out why. And if there's any way to fix all the ugly stuff around it. :-)

In any case. Off to work, my darlings. Have a lovely Thursday...

11:43 - David has not yet had a chance to read and crit "Deep", so I think I'll wait to do the second revision until I have his coments. In the meantime, I've cleaned my room, wrapped my sister's birthday present, cooked (if you can call it cooking to open a can and add a ton of pepper) some cream of chicken soup and a quarter turkey sandwich, written a three-word story for the Clarion group (no, it's not a story that's only three words long, it's a story using the three words that Ceej's random word generator came up with. Took about 20 minutes. Fun! Will send a copy to my list of e-mail readers; again, if you're not on that list and want to be, drop me a note) called "Leek Soup" (no, it's not erotica :-), and generally puttered around.

David is off dropping Cliff at the airport (Cliff is going to WorldCon in Texas, lucky dog). When David gets back, I'm going to drag him off to do some specialty food shopping; I want my Twinings Ceylon Breakfast tea (in the dark blue box) and some Indian groceries (Cliff informs us that there's good stuff at University and Tenth, so we'll try there).

Will take the rest of the day easy, I think. Reading, mostly. Eating more soup. I haven't even started tutoring yet...we'll see if I fall over at the end of next week. I think it's a damn good thing I'll have Thursdays off.

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