Woke up too early due to child who couldn’t sleep and climbed into bed with me at 4 a.m. (and immediately conked out), sigh, but managed to start being productive eventually despite grogginess. Still feeling reasonably good, in large part because I got some nice news yesterday that I can’t discuss yet (soon), and I also found a compliment about my writing in my FB messages (someone who was listening to one of the new SF stories (at Escape Pod or Lightspeed), and who really liked it; they hadn’t read any of my fiction before). Happy happy.
So far this morning I’ve processed a bunch of backlogged FB messages (many more to go, sigh — one goal for the summer is to get through all my e-mail and message backlog so I can then hand it over to Heather to do first pass on going forward, as I clearly get more more mail than I can keep up with on my own during the school year), worked on Maram logo design (oh, it’s so easy to fall down a rabbit hole of logo design articles!), and started two loaves of banana bread baking, both for the 9 a.m. Maram planning meeting, and for the children to delight in.
Nice buzz of productivity, so I can’t really regret the lost sleep — though I’m sure I’ll be feeling it by evening. For now, coffee is powering me through. More e-mail processing next, and then turning to the Maram website for an hour. Later today, actual writing work from 10 – 3, on Sigiriya — I meant to do it last week, but didn’t get to it, sigh. I need to flesh out nine characters, ideally writing brief background scenes for all of them. That’s probably about ten hours of work, but if I can get half of it done today, I’ll be very pleased. We’ll see.
I also had what might be a brilliant idea for my own Jump Space universe — intercutting one story-in-progress, “Thin Air,” with the rest of the published short stories, plus a few more unpublished; I think that actually might be surprisingly close to a book already. They are very tightly linked, thematically, a collection of pieces that explore an emerging interstellar war from various ordinary peoples’ perspectives. Interlinked stories seems to be my primary mode; it’s how I see the world. Or the universe.
I need to check with Cecilia Tan at Circlet on whether they’d be interested in publishing it (since they did The Stars Change), but it’s probably not going to be erotic in tone, so it’s somewhat outside their wheelhouse. So if not them, then I’ll be thinking about whether to ask Russ to try to sell it (this kind of interlinked story project is a hard sell for commercial presses), or whether to approach some smaller press like Liz Gorinsky’s Erewhon or Small Beer or Tachyon or Aqueduct….hmm. Well, write it first, Mary Anne. Sell later.
If I get a break, I may work on my own logo design — I need a Serendib Press logo for the cookbooks, and while I could hire someone, I think I want to at least take a stab at it myself. I actually kind of want to do a set of logos:
– Serendib Press (I had a little tea leaf logo I did aeons ago, but need to add the words, and also possibly rethink it entirely — and gah, somehow it’s coming up as an animated GIF in this post and I can’t seem to edit it out to a plain image, sorry.)
– Serendib Kitchen (cookbooks and cooking blog)
– Serendib Garden (there isn’t really a Serendib Garden ‘thing’ yet, but there could be….? A separate piece of the site for the garden photos and notes and handmade art and Spoonflower designs (which tend to be garden-y), plus promotion of Perennial, perhaps?)
– Serendib Tours? (I’m not sure if that’s the right thing to call it; the Sri Lanka writing retreat and/or food tour…? Serendib Retreat? Not sure which is clearer…)
Putzing around with art stuff for a while sounds like a nice break from endless e-mails!