not worth chewing through the leather straps

The Hang of Tuesdays

I took double the time I thought I needed off after finishing a zero, but I’m still stretched-thin and cranky. It always takes longer than I plan for, even if I plan for a ridiculous number of days. I should just give up planning and wallow.

Yeah, I can hear you laughing. It’s not gonna happen. Contact with the enemy throws all plans out the window but planning is indispensable, and all that. Maybe I’ll just revise the Nutless Kangaroo Shifter Story. It’s only 25k, and it’s fun. That might help ease me over the hill.

Otherwise, it’s all opera (yesterday I livetweeted the Met’s 2009 Lucia di Lammermoor, just for fun) and knocking off a bit of reading. I finished Leckie’s Strong Men Armed and have moved on to another Bolaño. The former is not perfect, I’ll admit–the casual racism is very much a product of its time–and Leckie struggles against the dehumanization of the “enemy” as much as anyone who had slogged through brutal combat can. It’s just what it says on the tin–the story told pretty much from the viewpoint of the Marines on the ground, of whom Leckie was one.

The Bolaño is…well, it’s pure Bolaño. Udo the narrator is a selfish piece of shit1, and Bolaño would have done better from a technical standpoint to do the book in the same close first person without trying for the epistolary feel of a diary. I keep thinking every time I read him that I’ll finish scratching that frustrating itch and be done with it, but like Jandek, sometimes I get in a mood and it’s the only thing that will do. Fortunately I have the rest of the TBR to get through when this is finished.

It would be nice if the dogs would stop trying to den in my TBR. In their defense, it’s in my office, where we all spend the majority of our days. And whenever they start, they get a reaction from me, which is probably the point of half their attempts. (Or more.)

I had a list of Serious Subjects for the post today, but any attempt to organize them makes me stare into the distance in self-defense. The part of recovery where you feel better but still have to be careful so you don’t tear something fragile and injure yourself even worse quite frankly sucks.

So it’s tea, some revisions, reading, and playing with tetchy bored canines today. The Princess has something pastry-based she wants to experiment with on her day off, and the oven is already going.

Not bad for a Tuesday.

A Basket of…

Sometimes, you come around a corner while out with your best friend, and you happen upon a basket of…well, of dicks. There’s no other way to put it, really–a basket of phalli just puts too nice a gloss on it.

And sometimes, you dig for your phone and mutter, “I have got to save this for posterity,” and your best friend responds, “Good God, why?” and you both double up with laughter.

Because really, if you can’t hurt yourself laughing over a basket of dicks with your best friend, well, what is life good for?

Crawling Along

I’m backing down from eight shots of espresso in the morning to four. So far, it’s not going well. I feel only half awake. I’m sure restless sleep has something to do with it, though, since Atlanta Bound is heating up and I had to drag myself away from the book last night. It wants to be done, but it keeps wriggling for a dark cave while I crawl after it, stabbing.

Graphic? Perhaps. Accurate? Completely. I need to weaken and bleed out the story to the point where I can finish it off in one last convulsive effort.

The entire corpus of Roadtrip Z is coming up on 200K words, and after Season 4 is finished, there will be a re-edited omnibus/box set. Which means I’m not going to be saying goodbye to Ginny and Lee all at once, but in stages. Which is nice, with a project this large and time-consuming. I’m already tossing around ideas for the serial I want to write after RZ is finished. Current contenders include Hell’s Acre and the Robin Hood in Space story. But we’ll have to see.

So Ginny, Lee, and the gang are almost to their final destination–in more ways than one. The zombies have grown desperate, and like most desperate creatures, much smarter and more ferocious. That’s the thing with a zombie story–the stakes must raise, and you’ve got to leave them room to do so. Fortunately, I’ve known from the beginning what the endgame is, as usual, and just had to throw enough obstacles in their way to make them really work for it. A couple beloved characters are going to have to die, too. And I’ve got to figure out what happens to Traveller-the-Hound.

So my work is cut out for me. Ideally, I’d like to get this zero out by the weekend so I can turn my attention to Hostage of Zhaon, which is currently languishing with an editor. I need feedback, and not getting it in a timely fashion is part of the great dance of publishing.

*time passes*

Typing that reminded me that nobody at the publisher knows what I’m thinking unless I tell them, so I wrote a quick email asking for an update. It costs nothing to ask where the process is at, and may be a gentle reminder that I am PATIENTLY WAITING, DAMMIT. (My agent would be laughing at me now, because she knows the exact dimensions of my professional patience.)

The house is quiet, a band of rain moved through earlier, and the wind is warmer than I expected, given the weather reports. I have to run, then open up Atlanta Bound and crawl along the story’s bloody trail, clutching a knife of words and hoping to at least slow the beast down so I can finish it off in a few days’ time.

Over and out.

Unsocial

I just need a few days where I don’t physically speak to anyone other than the kids. Oh, and the dogs. I mean, I do have to go to Goodwill to drop off a huge bag of the Princess’s old clothes and a bunch of stuffed animals the kids don’t want anymore, but that won’t take long. I just…have been very social lately, and I need to lock myself in my office and lunge for the end of Atlanta Bound. It’ll take some time to finish, but I can feel the fourth and final season of Roadtrip Z gathering steam for the race downhill to the end. Unfortunately, we still need a few deaths, at least one zombie bite, the death of a vehicle, and a run-in with some more not-very-nice survivors before we get to Atlanta, let alone the end.

It will be nice to get to the natural resting-place for the story. Roadtrip Z is one of the longer projects I’ve ever attempted, and there’s a certain amount of “Jesus Christ, why won’t this story just DIE?” going on. It’s a step above a traditional series in complexity, mostly because I have the hard deadline of a chapter each week. Because the working timeline is so compressed, I feel like it’s ONE HUGE 200K BOOK instead of four 50-60K books, and the perception of effort is waaaaay different. I don’t have the cooling-off and incubation period between seasons that I generally have between novels in a regular series. Which means everything’s fresh in my head for a longer period, but it also takes up braincycles I could use for things like, I don’t know, showers and remembering to eat? Maybe?

I guess my work’s cut out for me. Before that, though, there’s a run and some ebook formatting to get through.

Last week was full of Socializing In Person; now I need at least two weeks of closing my office door and not really talking to anyone in meatspace unless they’re my kids or writing partner. Online socializing is fine, because I can control my interaction speed and shut down if I get overwhelmed. Right now I’m in a particular sort of introvert hell, twitching while my energy juices replenish. I hope the poor person on duty at Goodwill doesn’t mind me simply grunting “No receipt, thanks,” and basically running away.

On the bright side, spring cleaning means lots of fresh new space downstairs. If more bookcases become necessary (please, dear gods, let it not be necessary) at least there will be space to shoehorn them in.

So. The second jolt of coffee has been downed, Odd Trundles is snoring contentedly, Miss B is eyeing my running clothes and pointing her nose down the hall, snugged across the office door so I can’t possibly attempt to leave without her, and I’ve a little formatting to poke at before I go run as if zombies are chasing me instead of my characters.

Over and out.

Lemon Glaze

I did not want to get out of bed today. I mean, I don’t ever want to, but this morning’s wanting was in a class all its own. Fortunately there was lemon poundcake left over from yesterday, which was even better today. Maybe it’s the sort of thing one has to make the day before, stick in the fridge, and try not to eat until the next morning.

The best thing about said cake was the glaze–sugar dissolved and heated in fresh-squeezed Meyer lemon juice, then poured over the hot and toothpick-jabbed poundcake, wait ten minutes, brush remainder of glaze over poundcake surface, let cool. The recipe said to take it out of the pan and brush it all over with the glaze, but I decided “fuck that” for two reasons: one, a tide of lemon syrup all over my counter is just asking for trouble, and two, I doubled the poundcake recipe to make a 13×9.

Because when I poundcake, dammit, I GO FOR GOLD.

Anyway, I can only guess that the glaze soaking in overnight, nestling in nooks and crannies, made for super deliciousness the next morning. For those interested, the recipe’s from Rose Levy Beranbaum’s Cake Bible–the basic poundcake recipe, lemon-poppyseed variation, only without the poppy seeds because I hate the little buggers between my teeth.

So, leftover poundcake with eight shots of espresso, I have a run to get in, and three projects on the burners now. Atlanta Bound is heating up; I have all the pieces in place for the season (and Roadtrip Z series) finale. I’m still going gonzo on Hostage of Zhaon–the first half of it is with a sensitivity reader now, so I should hear back soon whether there are giant fucking holes or the whole thing is just a bad idea. If it’s the former it’s probably fixable, but if it’s the latter, well, that’s 60K down the drain. Better that than being an asshole, though.

I’ve also been playing around with Hell’s Acre. I like both the characters, but I think the last scene I wrote needs to have its setting changed out in order to set up Breakbridge the Orphanage Director. Who is a very decent fellow doing his best.

No, I didn’t want to get out of bed today. Since I’m here and caffeinated, though, I might as well work. Miss B is pointed down the hallway, twitching every time I shift in my chair. She knows I have my running togs on, and that means motion.

Over and out.

Of Course, At Least

Of course Miss B had to wriggle and push until I was out of bed, despite a very interesting dream I kept longing to go back to involving a spy, a giant old refinished Victorian house, and microfiche. Of course Odd Trundles, bumbling around under the dining table, scared himself with a high-pitched noise from his own nether end and knocked over two chairs, wrenching the table almost sideways and almost, almost knocking a hapless African violet off said table. (It lost a leaf and keeps whispering about earthquakes.)

Of course the Mad Tortie had to try leaping into my lap while I was drinking coffee. She’s fine and the cup didn’t break, but I had to make another four shots because the first four hit the floor. And, and, of course, of course the damn squirrels have found the bird feeders and are gorging themselves.

Of course.

I’ve a middling-long run this morning, which means B will not be accompanying me. She will be quite put out by this, but she’s no longer the sprightly pup she used to be. Rest will do her good, and she can go with me tomorrow. Of course she won’t understand, and will supervise me extra hard upon my return.

At least I got some seeds into a mini-greenhouse, protected from squirrel depredations. I’ll be able to plant the starts when they come up and have a chance of them surviving, if the slugs aren’t too bad this year. I also got another hellebore into the ground, a beautiful deep-flowered one. The milky daffodils are coming up and I see evidence of hyacinths, the hop vine survived the winter and is by all appearances ready to make this the year it grows up the stair-rails with a vengeance.

And at least, if I don’t take B today, all the asshats who let their dogs offleash will only be moderately annoying. Small mercies.

I have hung a cheap bird feeder outside the kitchen window. On tiptoe, getting the hook into the holder, I heard the Princess laughing on the deck behind me. “What?” I tried not to sound aggrieved.

“I’m just thinking,” she said, “that maybe we’ll have more raining squirrels.”

I’m under strict orders to keep her posted.

Over and out.