Rowan Speedwell's Blog, page 8

The above phrase means "Each to his own taste," and is the French version of my tagline above. I'm using it today in reference to criticism and reviews. I'm a little sensitive today, having gotten tweaked, but I'm trying to put a good face on it. The reviewers (it was a group on Goodreads who'd selected Finding Zach for their March read) were all very polite and courteous, and I'm grateful that they chose Zach for their group. They were mostly kind. Some of it hurt, but I don't think it was meant to hurt, I think it was meant as constructive criticism. So it's okay. It's part of being a writer, learning to deal with criticism. I've never been good at it, but I'm trying to learn. I think the hardest thing was that the group moderator is an author I like, and he basically said I can't write. Ouch. I know that Zach is far from perfect; I wrote it in (for me) a short period of time, and it was my first book, so I'm still learning, but it's my first book, and it's my baby, so I can't help but feel a little sad. I have to get beyond that. So while it hurts, I will say nicely, "Thank you for choosing Zach, and I hope your experience wasn't terrible." And smile.

Apparently some people don't have the ability to do that—the Interwebz are roiling today with a writer who responded to a negative review with a flame war. The funny thing—and people are finding it hilarious—is that the writer is making an absolute fool of herself. The review criticized the grammar and editing, and the responses are masterpieces of examples of exactly that sort of thing. The woman claims to be British, but the sentence construction of not only her responses but the quotes from her book make her sound like a non-English speaker who is translating in her head. The book, from all reports, was unedited and self-published. Gives self-pubbing a bad name. Too bad.

Well, onwards and upwards, and never respond to a review, except to say "Thank you very much." My philosophy is just that. Say "Thank you," and smile.

I hope I'm getting it right.

"Charming rascal Tristan Northwood seems to have it all: an ancient name, a noble inheritance, a lovely wife, and a son he adores. Women love him, men admire him, and it seems there is nothing he can't do, whether it's seducing a society wife or winning a carriage race. Little does Society suspect that the name means nothing to him, the fortune is in his father's controlling hands, and he has no interest in his wife except a very distant friendship. Society bores him, and he takes dares because he only feels alive when he's dancing on the edge… until his wife's brother comes home from the wars.  

"Decorated war hero Major Charles Mountjoy jerks Tris out of his despair by inspiring feelings of passion Tris had never suspected himself capable of. Almost as terrifying as those feelings for Charles are the signs Charles might return his affection—or, even worse, that Charles sees the man Tristan has been trying so valiantly to hide from the world."

Gulp.

It's getting to be kinda sorta real. I've gone through the first batch of edits, have submitted the cover art specs, done the dedication and the acknowledgements, and now authorized the above blurb. Far as I can remember, I've just got the second round of edits and the galleys left. Oy.

In the meantime, Lynn is sending me some short stuff for the Daily Dose to edit, for which I will get paid. Woot!  It'll be good practice for possibly more editorial stuff.

And I'm getting to the exciting stuff in the fantasy short story I'm working on. Still have ambitions of getting it finished by the end of the month, which is just about a week away. Not sure where I'll send it; a day or two ago I just assumed it would be DSP, but then I got an invitation to submit from Amber Allure, so now I'm thinking I might branch out a bit. I have a hard enough time keeping myself straight with one publisher, but I'd like to see what other peeps have to offer. How weird.

http://www.queermagazineonline.com/author-interviews/author-interviews

J.P. Barnaby has posted an interview with yours truly on Queer Magazine Online. It's… long. But she asked some really good questions, not the usual boilerplate stuff. So it was fun to do. And she was very flattering in her intro, and I'm grateful!

I was on the phone with my mother this weekend and gave her a quick rundown of my scheduled activities for the next couple of months (actually, through November…!). Her first question was "why the Des Moines Gay Pride Parade?" (That would be Capital City Pride, the weekend of June 10th through June 13th.) I wasn't sure if she was asking "why Des Moines" or "why Gay Pride." Fact is, I think my newfound activism has thrown her for a bit of a loop, particularly the subject, since I've never claimed to be anything but straight. She doesn't quite get the interest I have in gay issues. I've never been politically active; I vote, but that's about it. Despite her attempts in my youth to get me involved; she once asked me if I wouldn't love to run for political office—and instead I ran screaming. Not a politician here, and I think it was disappointing for her, who grew up in an era when women didn't run for office, that I wasn't interested in taking advantage of the fact that I could. But given what I write, and what I've learned in the process, I feel that I need to give back to the community by supporting it however I can. As for why Des Moines—well, Heidi asked, and I answered. And it should be fun. I've never done anything like this before.

I'm doing MediaWest two weekends previous—Memorial Day Weekend, to be specific, when all my friends will be in Kentucky at Spring Crown Tournament. I've been to cons before, but I've never worked one. Again, hopefully will be fun.

Mom, of course, brought up the thing that is the gorilla in the corner:  "But love, you don't do well with crowds."  Oh, too true. And I think that that is going to be the tricky thing. I don't do well with crowds. As in:  Panic Attacks?  I Haz Them. So I will need to get to Lansing Friday night and have a quiet evening in the hotel and then show up on Saturday after a pleasant restful breakfast ready to work. Yeah. Cuz that's gonna work… 

I think I'm overbooked.

That's not unusual. I tend to overdo in a lot of aspects of my life, which is kind of funny, because I'm a lazy good-for-nothing most of the time. But I overbuy (two of everything? Really?) and overbook, and overeat, and over everything. Which leaves me cluttered, busy, and fat. Yep. That's me. But it's the enthusiasm that does it. I get excited about things, and then jump in feet first, not really thinking about whether or not it's good for me, or in my best interests. I'm a slave to my enthusiasms ("ooh, look! a new hobby! Let's buy everything I could possibly need if I were going to go into this professionally!!").  Overbooking is part of that. Because you see, not only am I booking book-related events, I'm also booking SCA related events, and family events, and personal events. And while the majority of them are fun and things I'm looking forward to, in the back of my head there's this voice going "um… 'scuse me? Time for me?" and reminding me that not enough rest means the fibromyalgia flares up, and too much socializing means the panic attacks flare up, and not enough downtime means the ulcer flares up. 

And then I mentally shoot the little voice in my head and say heartily "It'll be FINE." Which it will. Eventually.

Jasper Fforde is a genius. The way he can intertwine popular culture, classic literature, modern technology, puns, and philosophy together into one hilarious result is amazing. I am, of course, talking about the Thursday Next series, in which Thursday, a Literary Detective (Special Ops level 27, I believe), battles not only real-time villains but literary characters as well.

In the fifth book of his series, First Among Sequels, Fforde, armed with two or three versions of Friday, Thursday Next's son, and an army of Mrs. Danvers clones (yes, that Mrs. Danvers, from Rebecca), sets Thursday against the status quo as usual, said quo being the declining rates of readership in Britain and the rising rates of cheese-smuggling along the borders with the Socialist Republic of Wales.

Don't ask. Just read.

Anyway, I happened to read First Among Sequels this weekend, after an abortive attempt to watch a DVD of The Great Race, starring Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood, with slapstick bad guy duties shared by Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk. Directed by Blake Edwards. It was one of my favorite movies as a kid. How could it not be, with that cast and that direction?

But first, a word from our sponsor, the Toast Marketing Board.

Okay, not a sponsor, just a quote from First Among Sequels, explaining the concept of Schrodinger Night Fever.

You remember Schrodinger's Cat, the thought experiment we all learned about in Psych 101 or maybe Phil 101 and promptly forgot about. Oh. Right. Anyway, in short, it was all about putting an imaginary cat in an imaginary box with a weapon (radioactive isotope or something? Maybe a gun?) that would automatically go off if you opened the box. So you can't see in it, can't know if the cat is alive or dead, and if you open the box, that makes it dead anyway, so the question becomes moot. Schrodinger's hypothesis or theory or whatever the scientific term would be is that the cat exists in a dual state, both alive and dead, because we can't determine which it is. Or something like that. (Either way, you just wait a few weeks and the cat would definitely be dead. Which is why it's a thought experiment, because a real one would have PETA or the ASPCA all over it.)

Anyway, the important part about it is the duality issue. That things can exist in mutually opposing states. Fforde takes this into popular culture by talking about expectations:

 "If you go to see Saturday Night Fever expecting it be good, it's a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it's that, too.  Thus Saturday Night Fever can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation—even, in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology."

"I think I understand that, said Landen. "Does it work with any John Travolta movie?"

"Only the artistically ambiguous ones," replied Friday, "such as Pulp Fiction and Face/Off. Battlefield Earth doesn't work, because it's a stinker no matter how much you think you're going to like it, and Get Shorty doesn't work either, because you'd be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions."

So. It's all about the expectations.

But they can fail you. I started watching The Great Race fully expecting to enjoy it just as much as I did the 400 times I watched it on the late show during the 70s and 80s and haven't seen since.

First, a ten-minute overture. With the word "OVERTURE" in large, faux-Edwardian letters on a red screen. That's it. Just music playing in the background.

Followed by five minutes of credits with cutesy cartoons, again faux-Edwardian style.

Followed by maybe fifteen minutes of alternating scenes of Curtis—"The Great Leslie"—doing all sorts of daring feats of derring-do, and Lemmon and Falk attempting to outdo him but failing in various faux-hilarious ways. And I do mean "faux."

Then, finally, the story starts, with The Great Leslie proposing the race and Natalie Wood being introduced as a suffragette newspaper reporter desperate to get the story.

O.M.F.G.

THIS was the movie I'd loved for years?  For one thing, the level of sexism was insane, with Curtis constantly showing up or condescending to Wood's shrill, annoying suffragette because he's a man and therefore superior. Of course, by about five minutes into the story, I was ready to shake his hand, because I wanted to throw Wood out of a hot-air balloon. If she had been in charge of the suffrage movement, women would still not have the vote.

Nellie Bly should sue.

And what was supposed to be funny, wasn't. Curtis and Lemmon played caricatures of characters they'd played in the past, with dollops of stereotypes from bad 30s movies. Yes, I get that they were going for camp, but they went way overboard. I wasn't expecting subtlety, but neither was I expecting to have every. Damn. Joke shoved into my face and ground in. When Peter Falk, playing a cross between Renfield, Igor, and every other sidekick character ever invented, is the most subtle character in a movie, we're talking serious stinker.

I couldn't even watch it long enough to get to the scenes with Ross Martin, which used to be my favorite part of the movie.

I turned it off.  I could not watch it.

Lemmon and Curtis were so fabulous in Some Like It Hot, a movie that really does hold up under the weight of time, that I was heartbroken to see them playing caricatures of themselves in this one. And not even funny caricatures, but caricatures of caricatures. It wasn't comedy. It was… sad.

So I watched one of the DVDs I'd gotten from Netflix and fully expected to hate, but got because I was curious. It was the first nine episodes of that classic of Gothic horror and bad acting, Dark Shadows. I'd been a regular watcher during my misspent youth, but that was a long time ago, and I wanted to see how it held up. The disc was the first in the series, the early years—literally the first episodes—before Barnabas Collins was introduced. Victoria Winters is on her way to the mysterious house known as Collingwood. It was the 60s, the production values were cheesy, the writing stilted, the music shrill, and the acting just as dreadful as I expected.

And I loved it. Everyone was so earnest, trying so hard to make their silly story believable. They were trying, not playing caricatures, but really doing their best to engage with the plot. They wanted to make the viewer believe. In them, in the story, in the setting. And it worked. I had expected to watch maybe an episode or two before laughing and switching to Doctor Who. Instead, I watched all nine episodes (fortunately, they toned down the background music after the first couple) and enjoyed them immensely. I've got the rest in my queue. There's something like 200 before Barnabas shows up, so I imagine I'll be working through the series gradually, but I think I probably will do it.

Anyway, so here I was expecting to like The Great Race, and not, and expecting to dislike Dark Shadows, and not. Sort of the opposite of the Schrodinger Night Fever hypothesis that Friday Next postulates.

You never know.

But I guess that The Great Race does exist in two opposing states: the memory, in which it was awesome and fun and funny, and in the present perception, in which it is shrill, offensive, and annoying. Dark Shadows even more so—the reality of limited budgets and bad acting, and my perception of it as earnest and enjoyable. So in a sense they both do prove the hypothesis.

Or maybe it only works with John Travolta movies.

Today is the birthday of Garrett Augustus Morgan.  He was born in 1877, the son of former slaves. He invented the traffic signal and the gas mask, and is possibly the first black man to own a car.

More evidence to show what you were given means less than what you do with it. Some people have everything and do nothing; some have nothing and do everything. And some have everything and will do anything to keep others from doing anything.

 Two headlines caught my attention this week. (Okay, more than two, because I have the attention span of a gnat and am always going off reading articles that have nothing to do with what I'm supposed to be looking for.)  One was on the Supreme Court's determination that the "Baptist" church from Kansas (that shall remain nameless because I don't want them getting any more publicity), that bastion of radical nutcases, had the right to picket military funerals with anti-gay signs. The other was about a principal of a high school in Corpus Christi, Texas, that cancelled ALL of the extracurricular activities and clubs at the school so she wouldn't be obliged to permit a Gay-Straight Alliance club to form at the school, as she would be on the basis of federal law. (I think it was federal law. I not only have the attention span of a gnat, I have the memory of one, too. I do know that some law or other was in question. Sorry.)

 The fact is, the Constitution specifically allows wack-job cultists to spread messages of hate, as long as they don't do it in a way that incites violence. Okay, so far the wack-jobs have been lucky in that their victims haven't gotten physical with them, but it is only a matter of time. I suspect that they are targeting military funerals in specific for that very reason; they're hoping that someone will attack them, and then they can go on record as being the "victims." Military funerals are, even more so than the average regular funeral, hotbeds of grief and suppressed anger, and sooner or later someone's going to snap. These are men and women who have died in the service of their country, who of all people deserve a graceful and loving send-off, and it is heartbreaking to see evil people with an agenda of hate using the grief of a family and a nation to push that agenda forward. They should be struck by lightning.

 But it's still their right to do so. Even if they are terrorists of the emotional sort. I think it was Voltaire (or maybe Balzac; I get them mixed up) who said "I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

 The principal in Corpus Christi needs to hear that message. Rather than follow the spirit of the law and permit a club that she personally may not want to join (and who's asking her anyway) and that maybe goes against her personal beliefs, to form at a public school (and one, therefore, that must follow the laws of the government that funds it), she prefers to take away the privileges of all the students at the school. She is imposing her personal viewpoint on a public institution. This is not a matter of the principal's free speech. She is welcome to speak against the organization at any time: that is her right. But it is equally the right of the students to form the organization, as long as it complies with the accepted regulations of the school, and as long as this country does not permit discrimination on the basis of age, race, gender, or sexual orientation or any of the other things that are on the list, she is obliged to conform with that. She is a public employee, working at a public institution. She is paid by the taxpayers, and while administrators have a lot of leeway in decision-making, they must take into consideration what is not only in the best interest of the students, but what is the legal responsibility of the school in furthering those interests. She may not consider a Gay-Straight Alliance in the best interest of some of her students, but to cancel all clubs or student organizations is in the best interest of NONE of her students.

 In doing so, she has failed in her responsibility to her students, to her community, and to her employers.

 Sigh.

I'm usually pretty good at things I like to do.  I'm craftsy, sort of artistic, intelligent, blah, blah, blah.  So pretty much anything I set my mind to doing, I can do.  Particularly if it's something I LIKE doing.

I like archery.  A lot.  I like the people I shoot with, I like the culture of archery, I like the moments when I do a perfect release and the arrow hits the target with a healthy thump.  I like my wooden longbow and my custom arrows (with green, purple and white feathers, which are my heraldic colors) and my awesome purple leather quiver with the hummingbirds tooled on it.  I love my cool little Robin Hood hat Verena made for our archery team.

But I totally SUCK as an archer.  Seriously.  I have the world's worst aim. 

I always was lousy at things that require gross motor activity.  The fine stuff, sure; if I had been inclined that way, I bet I coulda been a neurosurgeon.  I used to make calligraphed documents and petitpoint pillows for dollhouses.  I still do really detailed illuminated manuscripts.  Fine motor skillz, I haz them.

But gym class?  Night. Mare.  I have a brain, and I have a body, and never the twain shall meet.  Good thing my bones don't break easily, cuz when you look up "klutz" in the dictionary, it has my picture.  Big feet, long bones, and eternal weight issues do not make for grace and poise.  Trying to coordinate all of them in any kind of sport is problematical.  The only things I was ever good at was swimming and horseback riding–two sports where something else was carrying the weight.  I didn't keep them up, unfortunately.

And now I have been peer-pressured into standing once a week with a 6-foot longbow and hurling pointy sticks at a teeny round target a mile or more from where I'm standing.  Okay, the target is actually 40 centimeters across, and it's more like 20 yards distant, but when you're standing on the line and aiming at the thing, it looks like a pinprick.  My hands and arms are encased in leather because when that string twangs, it can hurt if it comes in contact with any part of you, and feathers can cut.  It's unbelievable, but I have the scar to prove it.  My longbow is a dinky 28#, which has something to do with the amount of force that it provides when the string is drawn back and released.  One of the archers who is teaching me shoots a 110# longbow, which I can't even budge the string on.

We all, whether we shoot a longbow, a recurve, or an Asian horse bow, look down on the weenies who shoot compound bows.  Sights?  We use our eyes, as God intended!  Triggers?  Nope.  Fingers, dude. Fingers. Okay, we do wear gloves, cuz we're not stupid, but any weakling can get a lot of power out of a fiberglass bow with all kinds of pulleys and stuff.  I'd like to see one of them pick up Dougal's 110# longbow and try and shoot it.

But my point – and I do have one – is that for the first time I'm attempting to achieve competency in a sport.  I'm tracking scores and monitoring progress and even competing in a small way.  I'm doing it because it's fun, and it fits in with my Society for Creative Anachronism addiction, and because my friends all like it, and because I have wonderful people helping me learn what not to do.  But I'm doing it.  And I'm not good at it.

So maybe I should keep doing it.  Because I'm not good at it.  It's too easy to only do things that one is good at, and that's something I've done for a long time.  I like learning new things, but I always have this internal critic going "is this something you can do?" even before I try.  I don't know if I'll ever get to be good at archery.  I may never progress beyond my dinky little bow (which I won in a raffle and is awesome beyond belief) or get to be one of the ones picked first for a team.  I may never win a competition or save the Midrealm's War Points at Pennsic.  But that's okay.  I'm having fun.

I'm clipping along on a short—either a short story or a novella—and am enjoying the break from the novel that is my current official Work In Progress. I've found that occasionally doing a short while in the process of writing The Novel helps with the pacing; I did two while working on Kindred Hearts, and while Going Like Elsie (working title) isn't as complex as KH, it's still a novel, and complicated.  Breaking it up with a short piece hopefully will get the creative juices running again. I have more ideas for novels, but I refuse to start them until I get this one done. Harrumph.

I actually started Going Like Elsie during the writing of KH as my secondary project; after Finding Zach came out, I started getting anxious that people would want another contemporary rather than the historical, and so I came up with the premise of GLE.  It's a lot more chatty and a lot less angsty than Zach, and I'm hoping to have it done by May, and submitted to Dreamspinner around then, with hopes of getting it released (if accepted!) by the time I go to New Orleans for the GayRomLit retreat. That would be awesome. That's if Adam and Miles cooperate; neither of them right at this point is eager to make any sort of decision as to their relationship, and getting them to voice an opinion is tricksy. They tend to be smartasses and clever, and what drives me nuts is a too clever character. They're slippery. They're not as uncooperative as Tristan was, though. There were times I wanted to smack that boy.

The short is a fantasy story, set in a world I built some time ago for an epic straight fantasy that I never finished (sorry, Shannon!). That book was over 100,000 words when I fizzled out and not even half done with the story. (Someday I'll go back and review it and see if it's worth revising, maybe as a duology or trilogy. It has something like fourteen main characters…) Anyway, the short is set in a neighboring country in the dead of winter, inspired by the beastly snowstorm Chicago had two weeks ago. Two gay romances in the story, one an older couple, and one a younger. There's also a mysterious wizardy person, a legendary monster, and some magic, of course. I've got the story line roughed out, including the climax and the ending, which tells me right there it's a short piece. I never know what's going to happen in a novel. Right now the working title is "Duty and the Beast," but I know I'm going to want to change that!!

I'm really looking forward to going to New Orleans in October. My SCA friend and beta-reader Philippa is going with me, mostly because she likes New Orleans, and less so because she likes m/m (mine is the only stuff she reads). But it will be fun. It will also be confusing, because she tends to call my by my SCA name, Isabel, which is not the same as my real name or my pen name (obviously!). So people will be calling me Rowan or Isabel, and seeing as how just with Dreamspinner there is another Rowan, AND an Isabelle Rowan…  I can just visualize an incident with Philippa calling "Isabel!… uh, Rowan!!" and the real Isabelle Rowan turning around and going "What? Who are you??"

I'll let you know if that happens. I'm hoping she has a good sense of humor about it… eek.

I don't know if you follow news stories about the weather, but there was a little snowstorm in the Midwest this week.  Dumped oh, maybe 19-20 inches of the white wet stuff on Chicago, leaving 1,500 cars by one count stuck and abandoned on Lake Shore Drive for some 12 hours, snarling up traffic and locking people in their homes for a couple of days.  I managed to get home okay, leaving the office at 3 pm and heading for the train station. Which, of course, was packed with people all trying to do the same thing—get home before the weather got bad enough that the trains would stop running.

So there I was, standing at the front of the platform waiting for my train to arrive to whisk me safely home (or at least to my train stop, where I only had a mile or so of driving to manage to get me safely home). Behind me the folks were piling up. A couple of trains went by (my station is the Van Buren Street stop, the second station on the Electric Line) packed to the gills, with people standing in the aisles and in the vestibules. Then my train stopped and the doors opened, and will me, nil me, I was pushed onto the train. Well, "pushed" is not quite the word: it was more a case of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object; the pressure means something has to give. That was me. The vestibule was full, but the people behind me were determined to get on THIS TRAIN and so, therefore, was I. I was oozed into the vestibule, packed cheek by jowl with a bunch of strangers, and immobilized.

I'm claustrophobic. I do not do well with crowds or enclosed places with lots of people in them. I also have a herniated disc in my back, asthma, and panic attacks.  I'm also large, and carry a large, heavy backpack. Which of course I had removed and was now holding in my arms. The herniated disc makes it very uncomfortable to stand for any length of time. The weight of the backpack didn't help. I also get hot very easily (see the large comment, above).

Did I mention the train was a local?

Forty minutes into the ride, with the crowds growing no smaller (every time we stopped to let someone out, someone else squeezed on), I'm wheezing, fighting off a panic attack, dripping with sweat, and in misery. Martyr that I am, every time someone asked if I was okay—and there were several—I assured them I was. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, and when a gentleman asked the question, I said "No…" and I think he thought I was going to faint.

That's when the kindness of strangers kicked in. The man said, "Is there a seat? We have a lady getting sick…" and in less than a minute I not only had a seat, but had people fanning me, asking me if I was okay, helping me find my inhaler, and inquiring if I had a way of getting home from the train, was someone coming to pick me up, did I need a ride… Not one person got snippy, though I'm sure they were all miserable; not one person gave me a Look or was the slightest bit unkind. The person who got up to give me his seat hovered over me making sure I was breathing; the lady who was sharing my seat asked before she left the train if I was sure I was alright and would be okay.

The weather was ghastly:  cold and blowing with gusts up to 60 miles an hour. Inside that train car, though, I was warm.

"There are only 10 kinds of people in the world:  people who understand binary, and people who don't." Thanks, Ray.

The whole binary thing is an either-or proposition, and I'm not so good with either-ors.  I'm a Libra.  Decision-making is tough for me.  Simple things, like "do I want to buy that?  Do I have the money?  Yes?  Then yes," are okay.  Things like:  Do I go on the trip to Amsterdam and Brujes with my friend Patrice, a trip we have been sort of planning for a few months now, or do I go to the GayRomLit retreat in New Orleans that same weekend instead?  She says it's okay.  I'm torn.  I really do want to go to the retreat.  But I equally want to go to Europe.  Can I afford both?  Probably not.

 The date for the Europe trip is not cast in stone.  The time of year is prime for that part of the world.  I travel with Patrice a lot, going to various SCA events; we even camp together in the same pavilion for a week at Pennsic (and believe me, if we were going to kill each other, conditions at Pennsic are optimal for instigating that).  So I know we're compatible as traveling companions.  I have been trying to save money for the trip and think I will be able to swing it and still manage Pennsic this year.  And Patrice is a travel agent and I can leave the details to her. 

 I love New Orleans.  The event is in the Bourbon Orleans Hotel in the French Quarter.  It's a retreat, not a conference, so no boring meetings or seminars; instead we will be doing things like ghost walks, riverboat cruises, and wine-and-cheese parties (I don't like wine but I love me some cheese, and I'm not talking about romance novels).  Sounds like an awesome time.

 Hm.  Maybe Patrice would like to go to the retreat instead?  Cheaper, closer to home, shorter time span (I know she worries about her dad and her puppy when we're gone longer).  She's not necessarily a fan of Gay Romance, but she IS one of my beta readers…  Hm…

 Libras are also good at negotiation…

I was determined to post something today anyway, since it's been a while and I've been wanting to, and was thinking about Douglas Adams and maybe doing something philosophical about his Hitchhiker's series (not like anyone's EVER done that before).  But when I opened my email this morning and saw one from Elizabeth, the publisher at Dreamspinner Press…  well, let's just say everything I had thunk out about Hitchhiker's suddenly went *poof* in a spate of "SQUEE!!"

Kindred Hearts has been accepted!!!  And will be released sometime in May.  'Scuse me while I go stand in a corner and scream quietly.

KH is a nervewracking book for me.  For one thing, it's much more ambitious than Zach was.  There was a LOT more research to be done, and of course, I just did what I wanted to with Zach, since I pretty much didn't know what I was doing anyway.  I still don't know what I'm doing, but I have a better idea of what I SHOULD do, which freaks me out quite a bit.  Plus I have *fans* now (2 or 3 at least) so now I have to worry about whether they like it.  Didn't I write something about expectations a while ago? 

Let's face it, Zach was an experiment for me–can I finish a book and get it published–and now I have to put on my big girl pants and accept the responsibility of being a Real Life Author.  NOT THAT I AM COMPLAINING!!  God, no.  This whole thing has been a total thrill ride.  But I am so much more AWARE of things than I was a year ago at this time.  And I am not quite as confident about KH as I was about Finding Zach.

Oh, who am I bullshitting?  I wasn't confident about Zach, either!  I was nervous as hell.  Just like now.  I wonder if it will ever wear off?

So anyway, here's to Dreamspinner Press and the awesome staff there, and here's to my beta readers Patrice and Shannon for being my number one fans, and Lynda, to whom I owe not only beta-reading assistance but research assistance and editorial assistance–she is Captain Awesome and I want to be her when I grow up–and to my best friend Vic for the years of phone calls beginning "Write anything lately" and ending "Keep writing!"

I will.  Keep writing, that is.  But for now, I'm going to sit on my laurels (I know several Laurels–SCA in-joke) and bask in the momentary pleasure of being psychologically affirmed, once again.  Then it will be back to the hairy task of edits and promotion while trying to finish the next book…

I'm kidding.  I LOVE THIS LIFE.  Giggle.  Squee.