22887 words yesterday;…

22887 words yesterday; only half what I should've done. Had some trouble concentrating; not sure why. Frustrating. And I can't just dive into it now; I'm waiting for Duncan to call, and we're going to go over the copyedited manuscript of Kathryn, which will take a few hours, I suspect. Thorough copyeditor! She doesn't like it when I repeat words, for example. I tend to get into ruts. This is the last thing I have to do for Kathryn, though -- then I'm done, done, done with the manuscript. Oof! It's been a long haul. Pretty pleasant, though -- that's one way in which this has been unlike editing. There were some really unpleasant parts of editing: trying to get in touch with big name authors or their agents, trying to persuade them to give us a story, rejecting people's stories, especially the stories of people I knew... There's nothing awful like that with writing Kathryn. Some of it's slow and some of it's tedious, but it's all basically good. (I suppose if they'd told me I needed to cut 10,000 words, that might have been awful. But luckily, we didn't have to go there.)

I'm going to reward myself for finishing Kathryn after this call -- I got a Xmas present in the mail today, and since I'm not going to be here for Xmas anyway, I'm going to go ahead and open it now. I'm pretty sure it's from a journal-reader; the package is from Novica, and I know who usually sends me presents from them. Yay, holidays! Yay, presents!

So anyway, really ought to write about 5000 words today on the other project. Feasible, if I work on it from...oh, 2 to 7 or so. But not sure my energy will hold up. I'm pretty sure I've caught Roshani's cold; my head's all congested and my muscles are kind of ache-y. More to the point, I don't feel like working. I feel like going Christmas shopping, or hanging up more decorations (I'm going to be decorating up until the day I leave, I suspect. :-) I finished the Christmas cards -- I'll go get stamps today and put them in the mail. I still have some vague desire to finish The Poet and the Mathematician early, lay it out, print it up at Kinko's, and send copies to friends and family. The odds of that actually happening are getting slimmer and slimmer, though; I didn't write any of it yesterday, and I just wrote the new section for today, today. We'll see, though -- a random writing burst is not impossible.

I want Duncan to call already. Call, Duncan, call. He said 10-ish... Okay, more tea. Maybe dishes. I don't think I'll be able to concentrate on anything else until this is done.