asides
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Aug 042010
Feb 122009
I kid you not: I just watched a sulphur-crested cockatoo trip over his own feet and face beak-plant. Perhaps the cats, both crouched in gargoyle mode the other side of the window, are putting him off. Or perhaps the knock to the head he took when he flew into the window has broken something. Or perhaps they are the clumsiest birds known to man. It's a toss-up.
My head, lately, has been full of the dubious joys of apartment hunting. It's really not fun, is it? Today, to distract myself from the pangs of attempting to find a place to live using only willpower and the internet (although I must not neglect the power of awesome friends), I started pulling things off shelves, cleaning them off and making them ready for packing, and in the process discovered quite a few cups and mugs and even a pair of candlesticks I'd forgotten I owned. Not to mention that set of Mikasa champagne flutes. Bonus! (If only I drank champagne.)
Max...lives on the edge
Why, on a bed that is at least an acre wide in relative terms, does the cat choose to sleep with a portion of his body hanging off the edge?
back again (did you miss me?)
journal, shadow bound, writing life
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Dec 032008
Apologies for the extended silence; it was unavoidable.
I've not been idle while I wasn't here, but madly revising a novel and crying out "What was I thinking?! No, really, can you read this sentence and make a guess at what I might have been thinking? It doesn't seem to have a verb in it, so it's not conveying much in the way of information"… well, it doesn't make for exciting micro-blogging, really.
One thing I did discover was that my camera has a sepia setting, among other customisable settings.1 So of course I spent some time running around, taking photos on random settings. Naturally, a large percentage of these photos were of the cats.
Sometimes the delay on a digital camera gives you that perfect moment's capture
Max was a little (okay a lot) more boring, but gee sepia suits brown cats
- Okay, I knew it had customisable settings. It just took me a while to find them. Little buggers were hidden. You know, beneath the MENU button. Who woulda thunk to look there? [↩]
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.
Jul 292008
It's been a hectic few days weeks months, to say the least. I could sum up, but there is too much and, in the paradoxical way of these things, too little to bother. Cryptic, I know, but it is born of weariness.
The other night, being deprived of internet, I tallied up my work hours for the past little while. Turns out I've been working 90+ hour weeks for the past two months. No wonder I'm wearisome. So last night I rewarded myself with a bath, a bubble bath no less, which was a touch less restful than it might have been, owing to the cat's attempt to play with the bubbles. He didn't actually fall in, but it was a very near thing, and he's still not talking to me.
Today is my weekend from the dayjob, and, being the glutton for punishment I am, I intend to use it compiling the revision list for Pledged, so I can start in on the gamma draft for that and deliver it to the publishers sooner instead of later. I would of course prefer to rest, but if I want to eat next year, I should be virtuous. My ploy is to work slowly on two different projects, the gamma draft of Pledged and the alpha draft of the faerie novel, at the same time. That way, a change being as good as a holiday, I will get a holiday every day!
Or spontaneously implode. One or t'other.
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.
that's what's going to happen
journal
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May 242008
Today's walk home, or at least 1km thereof:
It doesn't look too bad, does it? This, however, is one of those hills which remains difficult. There's one particularly steep stretch where, on stopping to rest, I find myself leaning forward to counteract the sense of standing poised on a precipice and in danger of tumbling backwards.
On arriving home, it was to find the boycat had been effectively filed…
… under Spawn's dolly cot. Poor boycat. Presumably there was sunshine under the cot at one point, but the girlcat wasn't letting him out for love or money. One day he'll figure out he weighs twice as much as she does and could win easily…
Mar 292008
The dayjob and the freelance work conspired on me, handing me a 16.5 hour workday which left me sorely in need of movement to unlock all the muscles in my back and neck that had seized up from all that typing. Not to mention sleep. In truly spectacular fashion, I fell into bed at 6:30pm last night. Let me tell you, 12 hours sleep? Is GOOOOOOOOOOOD.
It's only 12 sleeps until I leave now, and the errands are not lessening. I had hoped by getting started early I might have them all out of the way by now but alas, life is wily and cannot be pre-empted so easily. To add to the confusion, one of my colleagues at the dayjob has resigned, leaving us all scrambling to cover her absence, and the cat apparently needs all his teeth pulled. Blerk. Lucky I had that long work day, I suppose — the extra money will take some of the sting out of the vet bill.
It's been days and days and days (ie, I've lost count now) without words, but not for lack of trying: a new novel is demanding all my spare attention, making me stop in random places to jot down notes and questions. It's still a little threadbare in terms of actual plot, however, and after the last revision I'm chary of stories who come knocking without plot, so I'm being stubborn and not starting it without some sort of idea of where it's going.
Feb 082008
While in Melbourne, I caught up with Andy, who claims he owns the most annoying cat in the world. It's a bold claim. I feel compelled to call him on it. One of his cat's less pleasant habits is sitting on his pillow, by his head, and licking his hair.
This, I agree, sounds particularly annoying.
Imagine my surprise on my first morning home, when my cat plonks himself on my pillow at stupid in the a.m. and (despite never displaying any such tendency in the past two years) promptly starts LICKING AND CHEWING MY HAIR.
Science tells me that a sample of one is not statistically significant, but I think I'm still safe in concluding that it's not Andy's cat whose at fault. Poor Audrey can't help herself. Clearly there is some sort of Macrae field at work, the vestiges of which clung to me on my trip home.
(It is worth noting at this point that the girlcat remained unaffected by the Macrae field. This, I believe, is largely due to the fact that she has discovered the beanbags, and we all know the beanbag snuggle factor overwhelms all other fields. She has not moved for the past twelve hours. At least.)
In other, utterly banal news, I have spent the past hour and a half fixing the laptop, since this evening the firewall spontaneously broke itself. A gazillion restarts later I have finally found my internets again! Why did this not happen on a day when I had plenty of time for writing?
Some days you win, some days the bear does.
Jan 122008
Today, in a fit of my-brainpan-is-scraped-dry procrastination, I cleaned up my various IM accounts. I can't promise I'll be online or available on them with any greater frequency than before, but if you're interested you can find my various accounts listed over on my livejournal profile page.
My brainpan is in fact scraped so dry I have very little else to offer, so in lieu of content, have a photo, because Tess wants photos. One of the girlcat's favourite activities is to "file" the boycat, or chase him into hiding into a narrow and dark alcove, which she does at least daily.
