Morning

(Well, maybe a little fooling: Heather reveals the hidden truth.)

Now that my April Fool's post is out of the way, a more sincere entry...

I finished marking changes to Poison Sleep, and as expected, the rewrites got more extensive near the end. Eventually my changes became so extreme that I couldn't legibly handwrite them, and I had to go into the Word document and do some wholesale rewriting. I'm happy with it now, though, and the final scene is much better, which is good, since endings are important, and I wanted to stick the landing. I do have a lot of handwritten corrections to type in, though, and will do that this afternoon. Exciting!

I finished the read-through on Friday, and decided to take Saturday off from writing work. It was hard! I usually do some work on Saturdays and Sundays, and having a whole day with no writing and no social plans proved tricky. We went shopping instead, visiting assorted furniture stores in our quest for a new coffee table. (Our old long table doesn't fit in front of our new couch, so we needed a smaller one.) We saw some gorgeous stuff in Chinatown (that's the Oakland Chinatown), but it was all either too expensive or all wrong for our décor. (Which is, admittedly, rather eclectic, but a big marble-topped table just wouldn't fit in.) Finally we wound up at Cost Plus World Market, where we found a gorgeous table of the perfect size for $160 bucks on sale. Naturally, they didn't have any in stock, and had no expectation of ever getting more in stock, so we thought we were out of luck, but Heather convinced them to sell us the floor model. (It's in pretty good shape.) Holly came over with her big car and helped us get it home. It looks good in our house. We also bought a new bath mat and some Jones juices (I love their Bada Bing flavor, but none of the restaurants or grocery stores or convenience stores I frequent carry it anymore! Except Cost Plus) and some glassware, etc.

What with buying the table, paying taxes for last year and the first quarter of this year, and booking Wiscon plane tickets, I've spent more money this weekend than I make in two months at the day job... sigh. Then again, having to pay a bunch in taxes is a sign that I'm getting decent writing income, so I won't complain. Plus I'm a liberal who likes public works, so I don't mind paying taxes, though I wish it was spent more on education and public parks and such, and less on violent altercations overseas...

Night

Wandered away from this entry for a while. But I'm back! I finished the revisions and e-mailed the book off to the interested parties. Let's wish my little manuscript well.

Today was productive, actually. Apart from the hours of working on Poison Sleep, I wrote another Caught in the Net column (on porn parodies, in honor of April Fool's Day), and I took a walk, and washed dishes, and did filing, and disposed of our old coffee table, and washed about a zillion loads of laundry.

It was a lonely afternoon, though -- Heather was working a table at an event, in exchange for a day off during the week sometime, so with luck we'll get a midweek day off together soon. I watched Saw via the wonder of Tivo, and thought it was a decent horror movie, though I'm not sufficiently interested to rent the sequels. When Heather got home, we started watching season 1 of Criminal Minds (because ebear keeps talking about how great it is, and I'm always up for good cop drama). The first couple of episodes were good, so we'll keep it up.

And that's a weekend. I printed out the manuscript of The Light of a Better World, which I haven't looked at in nearly a year, since Blue Heaven last year. I should be able to look at it objectively at this point, at least, and after my read through, I'll go back to the notes I took at the workshop... I distantly recall having good ideas to fix some of the problems people saw. I'm looking forward to digging into this book again. When did I start liking revision? I used to hate rewrites, but now I enjoy them almost as much as committing fresh fiction.