Just got done addressing and sealing up the last of my ARCs of Heart's Revenge and loaded them in the car for a trip to the PO (I was gonna mail off some today, but the frickin' place was closed... stupid President's Day!). And that's the last of 'em. I've got copies going off to bookstores in Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and Pittsboro, plus the Raleigh and Durham paper, as well as locations in Ocracoke, where the novel is set.

I think that oughta do it.

I should've gone to each store in person, of course, and given them the ol' sales pitch, but number one, I hate that crap, and number two, I simply don't have the time.

Because, you see, I've got a new job coming up, and I have to get ready for it. I'm moving on from the slow-moving corporate world of Lenovo--the company formerly known as IBM--and into a startup. And I couldn't be more excited. I don't want to say too much about the job, because that's not what this journal is really about, but suffice to say it's as close to a dream job as a technical writing position could get for me -- I'll be the entire documentation department, maybe doing some occasional training for customers and business partners, and most importantly, constant opportunities to improve. I was stagnating at my old job, just passing the time for a paycheck.

This is the spark I need; no more dragging ass to work every day, bummed about another day of drudgery.

And it's a permanent position -- no more contracting!

In other news, I finished typing in what I'd written three months ago for Sixteen Miles in my Moleskine, and it's pretty good stuff. I just have to figure out how to end that chapter. And decide which character's head to jump into for the net chapter...

Finally, I finished Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow last night, and I liked it pretty well overall, but the ending fell a bit flat for me. I think the book would've worked much better if it had a more linear structure, instead of the constant jumping around between two timelines, and a lot of the last 30 pages felt rushed. I mean, it's bold as hell to kill off all your main characters but one by the end of the book, but at least let their deaths mean something... Still, the characters were memorable, and the space travel on the asteroid was way cool.

And that's the latest and greatest here for me. Looks like I'll be reading some CRM and documentation books for a week or two, instead of fiction for a change (though I am itching to read the other stories in Polyphony 5). Got some more catching up to do! Later.