About ready to crash. Dazed, exhausted, and ecstatic. Longer post later, but omigod, I won the Nebula!
It’s been an amazing, surreal, terrifying, fabulous night.
Nebula weekend is much awesome. Saw the Atlantis shuttle launch. Recorded the whole thing on my Droid:
Exhausted, I sleep now. More details later.
Taking a break from madly packing to look over my Nebula Weekend schedule.
Aside from the Atlantis shuttle launch on Friday morning/afternoon, the mass book signing is also slated for Friday at 6:00 PM at the Hilton. Check out the horde of us who’ll be there: Continue reading
Got a note from the foreigner rights editor of the Czech ‘zine Pevnost asking to reprint “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest.” ‘Course I said “yes.” It’s slated to appear in the Oct. or Nov. issue.
This’ll make the fifth language my fiction has been translated into—French, Hungarian, Polish, and Greek being the other four. Coolness.
Nebula Weekend is this weekend. Geez, it totally snuck up on me. I blame Georgia’s extended legislative session for throwing me so off. With fosteronfilm working as a census taker and not having the time to handle all the domestic stuff for the next couple months, this is a really crappy year for the legislators to have dragged session out a @#%^&! month longer. Wasn’t initially going to take tomorrow off, but I think I’m going to have to in order to pack and get assorted pre-trip stuff taken care of before heading down to Florida.
Started checking weather.com compulsively, hoping the weather holds for Friday’s scheduled shuttle launch. It looks to be a lovely weekend temperature-wise—partly cloudy and in the 70s and low 80s—but they’re predicting a 10% chance of rain on Friday and 20% chance on Saturday. Don’t know at what point the weather requires the NASA folks to postpone a launch. Continue reading
Little over 3K new words on “Rampion.” Still the same working title. Tore out a whole scene in a fit of “feh” which required several new scenes to replace. Now the stupid thing is pushing the limits of novelette length and threatening to spill into being a novella. Dammit.
Not dwelling on it. Must focus on putting words on the page.
My friend teflaime recently got a Droid, and he was wondering if there was an Android app that lets you tether your phone as a wireless access point—that is, connect your phone to your laptop or desktop computer in order to use the phone’s data plan for Internet access.
When I first looked into this functionality when I got my Droid back in December, all the apps I found required you to root the phone, but I was curious so checked Android Market to see if there had been any new tethering apps developed. And there has!
Downloaded PdaNet from Android Market to my Droid and installed the computer-side setup from the app developer’s website on my VAIO laptop. Ran the setup on my laptop, plugged in phone to laptop using the USB cord, turned on the app, and it works! No rooting required. I’ve turned off my laptop’s wireless and am posting this using my Droid’s 3G connection. Have already done some trial surfing too. Very cool!
PdaNet can also tether via Bluetooth, although I haven’t tried that yet. And there’s a version for Mac O/S as well as Windows and also ones for the iPhone, Blackberry, and Palm O/S.
The free version blocks secure websites after a 14-day trial period (the license is $18.95, on sale from 23.95), but even after the trial, you can still use the free version to access non-secure sites.
Sweet! I can get Internet access on my laptop anywhere I can get 3G now.
Saw that “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest” came in second in the TTA Press Interzone Readers Poll after Jason Sanford’s fabulous novella, “Sublimation Angels.” Congrats to Jason for taking top honors for the second year in a row as well as claiming two of the top ten spots this year (with “Here We Are, Falling Through Shadows” at #6)!
Managed around 1K-ish new words on “Rampion” yesterday. The “-ish” ’cause the new words happened as part of an editing/rewrite pass and there’s been cutting as well as adding, making an exact count somewhat wibbly. At over 11K words, the first half or so I wrote several months ago, I’m having to go back and re-read—which means edit—the beginning and revise it to include some foreshadowing, without which the second half loses some cohesion. Also dwelling on a new title. Dwelling.
Still haven’t hit zero draft, but getting there.
There’s a guy I often see on the eastbound MARTA platform in the morning who also gets off at the Georgia State station. He works in the Twin Towers (Floyd Building), which is catty-corner to the capitol. We sometimes chat as we wait for the train to take us to our respective jobs.
Classic introvert and all, my natural proclivity is to be laconic versus loquacious. Actually, small talk and I are epic fail. I’m not good at it, don’t enjoy it, and tend to avoid it (although I do shamelessly eavesdrop on public conversations ’cause it’s such a fruitful source of writing material). Fortunately, fosteronfilm is gifted at doing off-the-cuff social banter—a trait he inherited from his mom; when we visit her, there are times when I can’t get a single word in between the two of them—and when possible, I tend to rely on him to conduct the majority of our small talk in situations that require it.
So when strangers try to strike up a conversation with me on or waiting for the train—which happens pretty regularly—I typically don’t put much effort into reciprocating and eventually, after enough lapses into awkward silence, they give up. Which means it’s rather unusual for me to have a small-talk acquaintance like this guy.
I still do a poor job of holding up my end of the conversation. But he doesn’t seem to mind the periodic intervals of silence. We don’t have much in common, but that doesn’t seem to deter him, and he seems content to keep our association on this casual small-talk-on-the-platform basis. (I’ve run into a couple other persistent guys who have made forays into trying to pick me up, at which point my limited conversation becomes even more limited as I steer it exclusively to mentions of Matthew and being married. An exceptionally effective conversation stopper/deterrent.)
Today, my small talk buddy (we exchanged names once, but I can’t remember his—I suck at names, more proof of how small talk and I are epic fail) and I commiserated about how, being state employees, we haven’t gotten a cost-of-living pay increase in three years but agreed that we are nevertheless glad to have employment, and then, as we often do, we switched to the topic of weather.
He mentioned, as he has before, that he likes to fish and do outdoorsy stuff so he’s hoping for sunny days this weekend. I replied, as I have before, that I prefer cloudy days, and went on to explain that I avoid the sun, being somewhat photosensitive and prone to getting sick when exposed to it. And he admitted that he shouldn’t be out in the sun either because he has lupus.
“Really?” I sez. “Me too! That’s why the sun makes me sick.”
And we started talking about our respective over-zealous immune systems. I was actually sort of sad when it came time for us to split off to our separate destinations.
I guess sometimes I don’t mind small talk all that much.
This is the second day that there’s been trouble on the tracks during my daily MARTA commute. Yesterday I expected it. Every time it rains, it mucks up the works. ‘Course the usual rain-related delay is around twenty minutes, whereas I was waiting on platforms—both southbound and eastbound—for just shy of an hour yesterday. But today, the southbound train stopped and the operator announced we might have to turn back. Watched two other southbound trains pass us by (one slowing and stopping alongside us, making me wonder whether they were going to extend ramps for us to cross over on), and I grumbled at myself for not having the good sense to hit snooze one more time or otherwise be slower getting to the MARTA station this morning.
Well, at least it’s made me appreciate that my day didn’t start out with a fiery-ball-of-twisted-metal deathtrap. That’s gotta count for something.
New words:
• 500 on “Rampion.” Should have gotten more down, but I went back a couple scenes to re-connect with the voice I’m trying to maintain and started editing.
