I’ve been doing a lot of…

I've been doing a lot of finishing off old projects; I've gotten my mailbox down to sixteen messages, which is frankly astonishing (around 100-ish items is more typical). And this morning I sent off the last of the Blowfish edits. Hopefully I'll have revised manuscripts back from the last few writers by the 20th, and I can then calculate final word counts, draft contracts, and send the manuscript in to Christophe. At that point my poor writers (who have been waiting patiently) can actually get paid, and I can sign off on the project. There might be one more round of proof-reading the galleys after that, but the bulk of the work will be done. Good. I've enjoyed reading through the stories again while doing edits -- there's lots of funny stuff, lots of charming stuff. I think it'll be a good book. And I'm really enjoying how many sf people are crossing over to erotica in it -- Jay Lake and Ben Rosenbaum and Bruce Holland Rogers and Ray Vukcevich, to name just a few. Lots of people who generally publish in both genres too, of course, like Kate Bachus and Dave Smeds and Lori Selke and Heather Shaw and my own Jed. A good mix! Lots o' tasty stuff.

Next is probably bill-paying, but I'm going to read a bit more de Lint first (I'm alternating Newford stories with my tasks today). Oh, and I read a really good book yesterday, Tom Disch's Camp Concentration. Unpredictable and very interesting. And sadly, I think he knows more big words than I do. Usually I just skip over the occasional big word, figuring I'll get enough of it from context, because I'm lazy, but Disch was actually using enough of them that he forced me to look them up! Which is pretty much unheard of. Actually, I got Kevin to look them up for me, but still.

Tonight, if I don't get too intimidated by the cold, I'm going out to the theater -- I'm trying to hook into the local Asian-American arts community, so I'm going to a benefit performance tonight at the Hothouse Theater, "Bombs and Butterflies", by Mango Tribe and others. Should be fun! I always enjoy this sort of thing when I go, and come back buzzing with creative juices. There's just the overcoming of the laziness to get through first. :-)

2 thoughts on “I’ve been doing a lot of…”

  1. When I read Camp Concentration in high school or college (because of a Delany essay about it, and because I was reading a lot of Disch at the time), I found that it used more words-I-didn’t-know per page than any other book I’d read. (I remember it as being one or two a page, but that may’ve been an exaggerated impression.) It was mighty impressive that way. An interesting way to show a protagonist’s super-intelligence—though I’m a bit dubious about the accuracy of using vocabulary per se for that purpose, since vocabulary has to be learned, which takes time.

  2. Yeah, he did sort of cheat on the whole smartness thing. The protagonist asks how they’d had time to learn so much in just a few months, and they respond by saying they think all the time, but that really doesn’t address reading speed. And does getting smart also come with eidetic memory? I suppose that’s implied, which is okay, but a bit odd.

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