the road holds great danger

 journal, shadow queen  6 Responses »
Sep 092008
 

The coloured tags mark out the pages which were too tricksome to fix on the first pass. Tricksome could mean the fix involved multiple pages, or finding a more elegant phrase which refused to come to mind at the time, or even that the fix simply required more from me than inserting a missed comma and thus was more than my sleep-deprived brain could handle that particular night. In other words, some will not actually be tricksome. Here's to hoping the latter form the majority of the fixes remaining!

But I do not think I will be working on the manuscript today. For today I came home to a smashed pane on the front door, and a ransacked house.

So far as I can see, they've only taken my jewellery, some loose cash, my old iPod, my chargers (ipod, mobile phone, and digital camera — I'll miss those until I can replace them!), and my backpack to carry it all out in. The jewellery is a blow, not because it was worth all that much but because of the sentimental value: every piece I had was a gift from someone precious to me. I'm somewhat astonished that they didn't take the laptop, which was sitting in plain view, or the LCD monitor of the desktop. It's possible, however, that I surprised them and they were still in the house when I came home — which is not a particularly pleasant thought.

I have spent the afternoon cleaning up after their mess, and the police forensic fellow's dust, and tonight I plan to enjoy a hot shower and some TV watching. Preferably involving crims getting their comeuppance.

Max thought the forensic police officer had placed all that lovely dust on the table in the sunshine just for him to loll about in. Helpful critter.

we're living with the lost and found

 journal, shadow queen  2 Responses »
Sep 072008
 

Today featured a walk to the local park, where we did not find koalas, but we did find roosters. Very well-fed glossy roosters who declined to spend any time eating our bread. We also found the playground infested with other people's children, which was mostly okay except for the little girl who kept telling us to "Go away!" Luckily, Brutus, despite being half her age, was larger than her and had stronger pushing power and sorted her out quickly enough.

So, because I clearly have too much time on my hands it made such a good distraction, lolchildren.

This was the steepest kid's slippery dip I have ever seen. It was nearly vertical.

I wish I was joking about this, but we really did spend most of the visit to the park taking tanbark out of Brutus' mouth. Apparently it is tasty.

In writing news, I have only 30 pages left of proofs…before I get to go through and work on the pages I've tagged as requiring multiple-page fixes.

omgits(notquite)abook

 journal, shadow queen  7 Responses »
Aug 292008
 

Wednesday's mail brought a lovely surprise: a book from my publisher.

My book!

The reading copies are printed and bound, and my lovely editor thought I might like to see a copy. I would post a photo but that would show off the cover, which my publisher has asked me not to do until before October, so for now you'll simply have to take my word that it is shiny and, furthermore, shiny.

Although I must say it is very surreal to be sitting at my desk, working on the proofs of a book that appears, according to the evidence of my eyes, to be already published.

oh call my name. you know my name.

 away come away, journal, shadow bound, shadow queen  6 Responses »
Aug 182008
 

I hafta say, the number of people who oppose or fear or distrust the toe sock is a little worrying to me.

If I owned more than the single pair of toe socks, I would wear them every day for weeks and months on end, and treat you all to photographs every day, in the interests of teaching you not to fear, or at the very least wearing you down into submission. Sadly, I only have the one pair, and photos of them are going to get same-ish mighty quick. So you are all off the hook. For now.

I've been doing my best, as per my previous plan, to work on several projects at once. Originally I thought this would only encompass the gamma draft of the sequel to Shadow Queen and the alpha draft of the faerie novel. Life intervened, however, and I added an outline and blurb for a paranormal short(ish) story and the proofs for Shadow Queen to that. Hafta say, this multi-tasking is breaking my brain. Don't quite know how grown-up writers manage it.

I'm also not entirely sure how helpful I'm going to be to my publisher in proofreading Shadow Queen at this point, since I appear to be reading what has been hammered into my head by previous drafts, rather than what is actually on the page.

the lies you tell in liverpool will follow you to spain

 journal, shadow queen, writing life  11 Responses »
Aug 172008
 

The proofs for Shadow Queen arrived a couple of days ago. While it's still an unbound slab of A4 sheaves of paper, it now has purty fonts and layout. In other words, this thing is beginning to look suspiciously like one of those critters you find on the shelves in bookstores.

I'm so new at all of this that I had to ask my editor what I was supposed to be doing this time with the stack of pretty paper. Looking for typos and stupidities I introduced while attempting to fix previous stupidities, it turns out. Which is actually pretty good timing, because reading through the first book now will help me notice inconsistencies as I attempt to conjure up a coherent gamma draft of the sequel. Or that's the plan. No plan survives first contact, though.

Also: I am wearing my toe socks today. Toe socks are made of awesome.

is it the apocalypse yet…?

 journal, shadow queen, writing life  2 Responses »
Jul 222008
 

Right, yes, hello…where were we?

There is a stack of paper 400+ pages thick sitting beside me, otherwise known as the copyedited manuscript, which I am tentatively calling done. Barring acts of random deities, genius ideas at two am, a plague of mice ravenous for a meal entirely of paper, or what-have-you, this stack of paper will be going in the post … er, soon. I missed today's post, and am flying to Melbourne for the day tomorrow for dayjob purposes. What do you think? Is it worth the agony of carting the stack on the plane and finding a post office in Melbourne, or do I attempt to make it to the post office on Thursday, in between knocking off work and closing time? Dilemmas, dilemmas.

The malware issue is not fixed, precisely, but I have narrowed in on the issue. I have found the registry key which was changed, but I may or may not have found whatever snippet of code did the changing. Just in case I didn't find it, I have set the firewall to be extra-vigilant at monitoring that set of registry keys. At any rate, I have not been plagued by hijacked websites for a whole day, which is promising. And a relief, because I was very, very close to reformatting the hard drive and resorting to a clean install.

There are probably other things, but I am quite braindead right now. So instead, have a photo:

I took this snap on my walk in to work about a month ago now. It had been raining and drizzling for over a week, and the colour in the sky as the sun cleared the hills was breathtaking.

i think it's called murphy's law?

 administrivia, journal, shadow queen, writing life  1 Response »
Jul 192008
 

I'm having a bit of a troubled run at the moment, with malware or possibly worse invading the computers and frazzling my concentration, not to mention making internet access patchy at best.

I think I have the problem stamped out on the laptop at least (fingers crossed), which means I've been able to resume progress on the copyedit, although knowing there's malicious code lurking unhunted and unpunished on the desktop is gnawing at me.

If I'm quiet in the next couple of days, it's because I'm copyediting and stalking down binary bugs. Back soon. (If I'm not, it's because I've fallen before the onslaught. Run. Save yourselves.)

 Posted by at 10:03 pm

i've just examined my life and found it wanting

 journal, shadow queen, writing life  6 Responses »
Jul 162008
 

The Pope, the evening news tells me, loved the koala. This is not particularly surprising — everybody loves the koalas.

I have finished the small stuff on the copyedits, and have only the big-fix pass to go. This, of course, is the slower and more frustrating pass, as it forces me to dig ever deeper in an attempt to fix something that was already, last time I saw it, the best I thought I could do. Once more into the breach!

(Also, the fact that I have used the word "fix" twice in the past paragraph is itching at me. Clearly, my copyeditor is having an influence on me.)

In utterly trivial news, my aunt has a cat who routinely stares at the wall. She parks herself facing the wall and ignoring all others in the room. Apparently she can do this for hours. It's her way of coping, now that she's not on the kitty equivalent of valium. It's a concept guaranteed to make me giggle, quite frankly.

where's your dunkirk spirit?

 journal, shadow queen, writing life  5 Responses »
Jul 152008
 

The copyedits slog on, and the further I wade in, the more notes I leave myself of the "yeah, come back and fix this, definitely" nature. This is the part of the process where I start to despair because I seem to be making more notes to self than I'm fixing. The mindset is entirely untrue and entirely transitory, of course. The only cure is to keep on keeping on, until the manuscript is finished. Such is (this) writer's life.

Today, just to prove that parking yourself in front of a computer for hours on end can be a dangerous and tricky affair, I discovered a tick biting me. A tick! This is because the cat, now he's all grown up and thinks he's smart enough, insists on venturing outside on a daily basis. Which would be fine, except he likes to visit the enormous snarl of obviously tick-infested lantana choking the gully behind the house.

I have also, of late, been experimenting with that most infamous of social network sites, facebook. Is it the most evil site ever created, or not? All these websites with "friends" networks, people who are allowed in and people who are not, irrelevant snippets of information about what your "friends" have recently been doing in terms of what applications they've added or what utterly illogical quizzes they've taken, trivialising social interaction.

Or maybe that's just me.

Don't mind me if I go a little silent over the next couple of days: it's my weekend, and I want to fix words while the dayjob is out of mind.

 Older Entries  Newer Entries