Winter is good for working

Wow, the last time I posted here I was 36. I'm 37 now. Everything is totally different, in every possible way. Honest.

I've been working hard on The Horns of Ruin pretty much this entire time. I have up days and down days, but progress is being made. Comparing the progress made to the progress that *must* be made...that's a little discouraging. It is mathematically feasible, but I don't like feeling as if I'm squeezing text out onto the page quite so much. Lesson: Take the full time you've been allotted for a work, rather than getting caught up in your job and having to rush it.

In some ways, taking this new job was a mistake. It really did kill about four or five months of my literary productivity. But it was unquestionably the right thing to do. My mental state was so poor at the other place. At the very least, I've bought myself a year or so of sanity. Hopefully that will be enough.

One nice thing that's happened on the current book. For Heart of Veridon, there was this moment about two weeks before the book was due that I had this moment of clarity. It took my agent going through the book and showing me the problems, but I had a clear vision of how the book should be formed. Pity that I had already written it. What followed was about three weeks of the most hectic and all consuming revision I've ever performed, and what came out of it was a better book.

I've already had that moment. I may have it again, later, when it's more inconvenient. We'll see. But for now I've seen the book. Had to throw out some text, rearrange some chapters. Essentially made myself a lot more work, when I already had a lot of work. But it'll be a better book.

I've started writing at lunch, which is something I didn't attempt with HoV. Usually I read at lunch, something genre specific but not too similar to what I'm doing. It gives my creative mind some room to stretch, plus I enjoy it. Put that aside for now.

Work work work.

The Dead of Veridon

Official happiness. I got the contract from my agent today for The Dead of Veridon, the next Jacob Burn novel. Tentative publication date is in the first quarter of 2011. Solaris comes through, my boys! Hooray!

Maybe fuck each other?

I'm sitting here at work reading about the Intelligent Mail Barcode, preparing to format my mail.dat file for use in the Testing Environment for Mailers. This is...kind of a complicated process. Better, it's a complicated process that is provided to you by the government, so it is perhaps intentionally impenetrable. I finally found a checklist to make sure you've got everything squared away. It's 70 pages long. Better, step one on the checklist is:

1) Review the Guides & Specifications (refer to Appendix A)

Appendix A is 100 pages long.

The point is, I'm bored out of my fucking mind, and now I remember why I did shit in school. I hate being bored. I hate doing boring things. I don't really want to know about the new standards for TEM. They can fuck themselves. They probably *should* fuck themselves. Loosen up a little.

Jee. Zus. Christ.