The Day After Yesterday

So, three days ago I was wandering around the world in barely a sweater, it was warm and sunny, everything had melted, and life was nice.

Then, the storm hit.

We have, on average, around fourteen inches of snow on the ground. In places where it blew or could pile a little, it's easily twenty to twenty-two inches deep. It took me twenty-five minutes to shovel out the car so my wife could go to work. The wind is still going at ten miles an hour, but yesterday it ranged between twenty and thirty miles an hour.

Alas I have, when supplying my house, completely neglected the whole Snowshoes-and-dogsleds area, which could prove problematic. Fortunately, I have enough supplies (viz. popcorn, books) that I can hold out until help arrives.

Later, I will begin digging a tunnel under the snow, with holes for air every dozen yards or so. In this manner, I hope to reach civilization again.

Excuse me, I must go chop off my left frostbitten foot.

Quick note

BBT Magazine has a new web-site online which is very impressive and cool and built by yours truly, so you'd better love it (because I failed to go to sleep last night in the process of building it).

www.bbtmagazine.com

Check it out.

My robot serial is going through weird formatting issues which changes how I have to write it. It's still going ahead, though, so that makes me happy. I should have the first 'issue' (which will be three episodes long) done in the next hour or so. Released sometime in May, I think.

I have some interesting ruminations to share, but no time to share them! So they'll have to wait for a day or two.

It's thirty degrees and sunny outside, and it feels like summer in my deluded mind. I have all the windows open. I'm going to die thinking it was summer but with pneumonia anyway. You just watch.

Spring! I say thee, spriiiiing!

Except it's not spring here yet, but my body's decided it should be. Today, despite the temperature being below zero after the wind chill, I opened all the windows. It was wonderful. You don't realize how stale the air is getting until you let it all out.

(The fact that I made fried chicken a couple nights ago, and we have all manner of cats in the house does not help the air-getting-stale business)

It got chilly eventually, but it felt wonderful. Now if only I could go outside in something besides eight layers of clothes...

So.

Writing.

(that's nearly all I ever talk about, I realize, but to be fair...that's nearly all I ever do. It's like being a fish who's preoccupied with swimming and looking goggle-eyed. No one should be surprised.)

I missed my deadline, but I knew I would, and it's not by much, and it doesn't affect anything too badly. I still got a serious lot of fiction written in short order, something I'm pretty proud of.

I kept saying that when I was done with this first batch of episodes, I would take a break for a few days and sleep a lot (since last night I went to bed by 2am, and it felt like I'd gone to bed incredibly early) and I would hang out with friends and such.

Except...

...except that as I wrapped up the last of the episodes, I realized that I have a short story which has been waiting patiently to be written which I really want to write. So I'll work on it slower than I worked on the first four episodes of the serial, but I think I'll work on it anyway.

And between episode's 2 and 3, I started to write the beginning pages of a comic book script, for a one-shot story which I showed to an editor. He read the story, and suggested that it would work much better as a single issue comic book. He's right. It does. So I'm re-writing that.

And...I'm itching to write the novel that Carrie and I dreamed up (remember? set in London? with zombies? Carrie? Hello?) but which I'm patiently waiting to start writing until she and I can work on it together.

I've done so good this time. My collaberations usually fail because I stat wirting something with somebody else, and then I fail to run out of ideas and wind up writing the whole damn thing, and thne I have to go to the co-author and say "er. Sorry. I wound up doing the story myself."

Trying not to do that here.

For my next post, I hope to show off a piece of concept art for my serial, and maybe give some information about it. I raelly want to, I just have to make sure it's not too soon. We shall see.

Right. It's above zero now, time to break out the shorts and go work on my tan!

(or, huddle inside and try to stay warm)

Deadlines, shattering of

This morning, I woke up fast, despite having been up until four in the morning last night. This was because the sound waking me up was not the melodious sound of my wife's voice, nor the persistent sound of my cats' voices, but the slightly unhappy voice of the bookstore owner, wondering why, if I was the one opening the bookstore this morning, the bookstore was unopened and I was not present.

Not the best way to get up. It got me up, though.

I discovered with a sick thud, once my brain had turned into a working component and not something I just carry around, that today's February 12th. That means I have four days to make The Deadline. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, except that I still have 22,000 words to go. Half of one episode and the full text of the fourth episode.

Normally, when I get this crunched against a deadline, I just go without sleeping much. This is only marginally helpful here, since I'm already up until three or four in the morning.

I'm going to come very close to making it. I really am. Heck, I might still make it. Episode four might come to me as a gift from the gods, pre-wrapped and flowing onto the paper. But the odds are better that I'll have to stop now and again during writing to figure out where I'm going, and how close it is to where I intended to go. I can't be quite as free to wander when I'm writing serialized fiction. Or at least, I can wander all I want, but it has to be accounted for, so I don't wander myself into a corner with no escape. Serial fiction is, essentially, writing in the public eye. I'm less willing to just head off blindly and face the possibility of breaking the whole thing. I don't want people reading episode 25 and it ends on page 12 out of nowhere with"...sorry folks, I'm out of ideas. Hey, remember episode 15? Boy that was cool! Please do not try to make contact with me. My mail is being screened. Yours, the Author."

...

I also discovered, yesterday, that while sitting inside, I had to remind myself that if I stepped outside, it was going to be sub-zero weather with snow on the ground. In my mind, it's sunny and warm and green, with a gentle cool breeze. This means I'm either going a little bit nuts (a distinct possibility I haven't ruled out) or else I've had enough of Minnesota winters and I'm ready for spring (more likely.)

So.

That's where I'm at.