Argh. Missed registration for Spring. Have to pay a fee. Argh. How annoying, especially since it's entirely my own fault.
Oh well...otherwise, things are going fairly well. Spent some time yesterday signing autograph labels for my book - very exciting. :-) I'm sure I'll get tired of it at some point, but right now, it's all still a little hard to believe. Now I think the next step is to wander around to local bookstores with a copy and ask them to carry it. Not quite sure how one goes about this, but Good Vibrations and Blowfish have already said they're definitely interested in carrying it. :-) Have to ask my editor if he can send Blowfish a review copy.
I've also recently contracted with Puritan to do another novella (for about four months from now - space opera farce :-) Y'know the old style -- Galaxy Janet Meets the Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon VI -- should be a lot of fun. A nice change from the very bleak horror piece I just finished for them. I'm also working on an article for them on the bdsm scene in S.F. -- specifically, interviewing local professional dominatrices (is that the right spelling of the plural?). Should be interesting, at the very least. :-)
I quit the Mills web page job yesterday. It just didn't make sense, financially -- I should have listened to Kevin when he told me so. It kept getting pushed to last priority (after academics, novel, and work contracts), which is reasonable, but not fair to them. Hopefully they'll be able to find someone good to replace me.
Hey, are any of you involved with the game/product-testing industry in the Bay Area? Sherman's having a rough time right now -- got laid off, and while he was accepted for a job almost immediately at another company, their budget got slashed, and they weren't able to hire him after all. If you have any contacts in the industry, let me know, please, and I'll forward the info to him. (Or you can mail him directly - sherman@cyborganic.net).
Did some work on my academic paper this morning -- it's fascinating in its own way, but not coalescing to a thesis very well. Lots of interesting bits. Maybe I'll make some of you read what I have so far and see if you can make sense of it. :-)
Some interesting twists in the novel lately. Among other things, it looks like it's going to be a trilogy (no, not a trilogy!!!) rather than just one book -- that seems to be the way the structure is working out. Which means a) it's more marketable, but b) I have to write about three times as many words. :-) Still, it's kind of fun planning to have Our Heroine in terribly dire straits at the end of book 1... (and no, I'm not giving it away, 'cause I may change my mind entirely by the time I finish the darn thing). I wonder if I need to finish the second and third books before I start shopping the first one around....well, I'm probably getting ahead of myself, since I'm only 120 pages into book 1 (and it'll be at LEAST double that when it's done). I think I may also need a new title (well, three of them, with maybe an overarching title). Not sure I want to stick with "Dreams by Lamplight", though I am fond of it. Storm Constantine did great titles (though Sherman thinks they're pretentious). Ah well.
2:00 - Long entry today. It's a rainy day, and in fact, I'm somewhat trapped on campus because I didn't bring a jacket. So I can either get rather drenched going home, or wait and hope it stops soon. Just ate too much lunch (why do I always overestimate how much I really want?) and am so feeling very sedate, so I think I will sit in this computer room, reading and writing and thinking for a while. Maybe the rain will stop. In the meantime, it's lovely.
I am running out of words for beautiful. In the novel, since the heroine is a courtesan, beauty is much a concern. I'm fascinated by beauty, by its arbitrariness, by its importance, by the way a single red tree in a field of green or an angle of cheekbone or the motion of light on water can catch at your heart and you say, "oh, how beautiful". And who knows what that word means, because it's also the sound of a single saxophone at night, or a perfect chocolate mousse, or the musky scent of your lover -- it's not just visual at all -- it's not even necessarily concrete. The idea that there may be (should be) other races on other planets in the cosmos, or the perfection of Hume's skepticism, or the impossible idealism of the young...how can those be other than beautiful? And I can say lovely, gorgeous, beautiful, exquisite, attractive, radiant, superb, pretty, but already we have gotten too specific, and there is just too much that is simply beautiful, and not enough words to say it. It's enough to drive a poor writer mad.
*smile* I'm not really complaining. I have the best job in the world, and well I know it (though occasionally, I have vague yearnings to be Emma Thompson), and the frustrations come with the territory. I am certainly tempted to coin a new word for vagina, 'cause there just isn't anything appropriate. I want something descriptive, but not clinical, not euphemistic, not crass or crude. The equivalent of breast, or even leg. Just a neutral word that I can then flavor as I like. Ah well...
I'm rambling...I assume that's not a problem with y'all. You know, many of you, when you write to me, say that it's odd -- that you feel like you know me, despite having never met me. Some even say that they feel uncomfortable that I don't know them as well, and proceed to pour out all sorts of fascinating details about their own lives. :-) This journal is an odd blend of a little introspection, such as you might really find in a journal, and a whole lot of chattiness. I feel like I'm writing a letter to a friend(s)...and I sometimes forget that the people reading this aren't just the people I've actually corresponded with (some of you daily :-), but more of an open letter to the world. This isn't a problem, and I'm not saying you must all write to me so I feel more aware/comfortable. It's actually a part of being a writer that comes fairly easily to me, the openness/extrovertedness/baring of the soul (and all the petty, pathetic details as well). Oh, I don't tell you in detail - here are my faults - but if you've been reading this journal all along (almost a year now), then you probably know them pretty well. I guess I'm lucky it comes easily to me.
Though perhaps unlucky as well, in a way. Writers are generally supposed to be introverts rather than extroverts (supposed to be not in an intentionality sort of way, but more of that's the way it tends to be sort of way), and I don't think I'm typical. I'm perhaps not as introspective as I should be -- crunching out pages and pages of prose comes easily to me, but deep and meaningful insights into the human heart....well, I tend to rely on my friends to tell me when I need to do some work on my own psyche. (They're pretty good at it too. If you ever need a swift kick in the pants, I can refer you to some excellent people). Maybe if I spent more time in introspection, though, my work would be deeper...
Ah, I'm probably just whining again. Nobody gets it easy -- deep and meaningful insights don't come cheap. :-) Figure I just do what I'm doing and hope I get wiser as I go along. I'm only 25 - I've got at least another 5-10 years of being called a 'young' writer (probably no matter WHAT I write...:-)
4:30 - 111 pages on the novel. A lucky sign. :-) Time to knock off work and head home, I think. Ellison's (housemate) parents are coming this weekend, and I promised to help him scrub the house.