life is great!

Yesterday

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Here’s a quick tally of yesterday’s strangeness (not all of it bad):

Woke early. Worked on …Blue Dog for a while, then rushed home.

Went out just after lunch to see BATTLE FOR TERRA. My son nearly fell asleep on the bus.

We all stopped in at a comics shop for Free Comics Day. The first comics we saw were very, very adult. We had to make our way to the back to pick up books the boy wanted.

At the movie theater, I had to take the elevator. This particular shopping center (Pacific Place) is four stories with a wide open mezzanine structure. The escalators trigger my fear of heights, and for some reason I was extremely vulnerable yesterday.

Loved the movie. See previous post.

At the boy’s insistence, we sat down to eat at Johnnie Rockets, which was even worse than I remembered. The meal was interrupted partway through by an PA announcement that they were evacuating the building.. I stayed behind to settle the bill, then met my wife and son outside. So much for visiting the bookstore in the basement.

On the bus ride home, I noticed something strange just before we came to our stop. A woman was standing by the door to her townhouse, pushing a man away. She would then turn to unlock her door, and he came up close to her again. She appeared to be fending him off.

My wife said “That didn’t look good.” We all got off the bus and I immediately went over there, but they had both gone inside. When I turned around, I saw that my wife had flagged down a police car. We explained what we saw, and he promised to look into it.

Was she about to be raped? Why was the building evacuated? I don’t think we’re ever going to find out.

I was planning to post about the 2008 bestseller list

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But hey, something else came up. What was it, you ask?

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Why, it’s the advanced reader’s editions of my book!

Holy crap! I am holding my first book in my hand and I am walking on air. When I took them out of the envelope, I was stunned to see that they had covers on them. I don’t know why I assumed they’d have plain covers like those stacks of books I saw that time at The Strand, but I just stared and stared at it.

And I thought Christ! It’s huge!

I seriously thought it was the biggest mass market paperback I’d ever seen, and I had to compare it to the books on my shelf to convince myself it was the normal size.

Oh, hey! Wanna see the whole cover?

Child of Fire All Cover

It’s a little hard to read that text, but if you want to read the back cover text, check out this larger version of the file. It’s three copies of the book photocopied together, but I’m not tearing one apart for my blog. At that link you can see the blurbs from Jim Butcher, Terry Rossio and Sherwood Smith, and the back cover copy, too.

And now I’m going to bed. I have a scene to revise tomorrow, and suddenly it doesn’t feel daunting at all.

:-)

Yay!

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I’m going to San Diego Comic-Con as a professional. (!) That means I can go to all four days, if I want.

You know, I’ve never been to a convention before. From what I understand, this one is at the far end of the bell curve.

Have I mentioned how much I dislike jumping into the deep end? Not that I’m nervous, or anything.

This I vow

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From this point forward, I will treat a drippy kitchen faucet the way I treat a malfunctioning computer keyboard: I will detach it, throw it out and buy a replacement.

This shit is not worth the headache or the mess.

Ugh.

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The crappy thing about buying a jacket from a thrift shop like Value Village, even a nice one, is that you might stick your hand in the pocket and pull out an old, yellowed fingernail clipping. Bleh.

My desktop computer went insane mid-comment yesterday. All I could type was Greek letters, math symbols and other crap. After a wasted hour and an increasingly bitter certitude that my computer had given up the ghost six months after my extended Applecare had run out, I discovered that it’s (almost certainly) a broken keyboard. Which means I will be stimulating the economy on my lunch hour.

I am having trouble sleeping and waking early to do my daily pages. I’m way behind on my schedule for Man Bites World, and it’s really bugging me. Then again, I always have trouble sleeping and waking at this time of year. Must do better, must do better, must do better.

And then, this morning I was riding the bus reading a book I should be enjoying much more than I am, feeling grouchy and inadequate as I head to a job I don’t much like but really really need, the bus tops the hill behind my house and I get a sudden vision.

Today is a rare clear winter’s day, and because I missed my morning bus, I was riding to work just as the sun came up. And in the time it took the bus to make a left hand turn, I caught a glimpse of the Olympic Mountains on the other side of the Sound, their snow caps pink from the rising sun. And just a few degrees above them was the full moon.

And it was beautiful.

I’m already off course for the day.

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We had a slushing of snow last night (which is like a dusting, but sloppier) which we weren’t expecting and only discovered when we received an automated call telling us school would be starting 2 hours late.

Now I’m behind on everything I need to do today. For instance:

I have to finish up the chili I put in the crockpot last night and jam it into our refridgerator somehow.

I have to vacuum. A good half hour was spent fixing the damn thing yesterday, and that’s after more than a week of struggling with it. Our carpet is really, really in need of a vacuuming right now, and that’s what I’m going to do next.

Recycling needs to be done.

And so on.

But before I get to the vacuuming and writing my words for today, I have to post this for geniusofevil:

When I came back to writing as an adult, and decided to pursue it seriously, I was trying to write for the movies. I wrote thrillers and zombie space comedies and alien invader scripts and so on. Twice I tried to make the move to L.A. but punked out both times. Once back in Seattle, I got together with a friend to make our own low budget horror films, but that didn’t work out well for me.

And I realized I had changed in the last few years. I now preferred books to movies and so I went back to writing fiction.

So! When I received a note from my editor that I should hold off on writing book three because she had a concern about the proposal, I felt a little sick. I couldn’t help thinking of that scene in SUNSET BOULEVARD where the producer wants to change the writer’s submarine thriller in a comedy about women’s baseball. And I was remembering going through the script I wrote for our horror film with my director, and all the changes he wanted me to make.

But I was startled by the notes I actually received. It wasn’t “Make sure [supporting character x] appears by page fifty and stays through to the end. We like that character.” Nor was it “This setting won’t work for us. What else do you have?”

It was all suggestions about making the book work. Very polite suggestions, too, (which makes me want to take them all the more). “This sounds interesting and should make a good contrast with the previous books.’ “Will this character be appearing?” “Be sure to tell us if [minor character y] survived book two.” “I’d like to see more exploration of the group they belong to.”

And so on. All good ideas, even if I’m not sure I have room in the book to implement them, and all designed to make it a deeper book than I would have written otherwise. Not once did she suggest that I add a sexy, sexy love interest or a zany chimp, and Pikachu help me, I don’t know why I expected it.

Okay. I’m off to work.

The habits of poverty

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For them what weren’t around back then, a few years back I and my family were in tough financial straits. Basically, my wonderful wife needed shoulder surgery, and the only health insurance we had was a Mastercard.

So, yeah. You know where this is going, I’ll bet. We came close to bankruptcy, and only avoided that by being insanely frugal. When we came out the other end (weirdly, it happened a month before I signed with my agent–everything turned around in those few weeks) my marriage was stronger than ever and I was determined to see health care reform in this country.

Anyway, those frugal habits have been very hard to break. Eating at restaurants. Buying books. Shopping for organic foods again.

And turning on the heat. We didn’t turn on our heat at all the last couple of winters–getting by on found scrap wood in the fireplace and cooking lots of roasts and bread.

But earlier this week, I’d had enough. I was honestly sick of it. I hated being cold all the time. I hated wearing a knit cap and neck gaitor inside, and sleeping under four blankets and two unzipped sleeping bags.

So, this afternoon, my son and I cleared the furniture away from our baseboard heaters. Then we took out all the paper airplanes, flower petals, number 2 pencils, yellow highlighters and paraffin candles that had fallen onto it over the past few years.

And I turned on the heat. I swear, I can not even express to you what a tremendous relief it is to be in a 62 degree apartment.

I wonder what other habits I still need to deprogram.