These things that happen

Today had its good and its bad, and honestly the good way outweighed the bad. It's hardly like you're reading my blog at all, isn't it? It's like I'm some kind of damn happy person who tells you about the good things in their life. That's just crazy.

To keep in theme, I'll tell you about the bad stuff first. Many work problems. We had a server utterly fail at work, and we're scrambling for replacement parts and what not. It's a mess. But it wasn't so bad, mostly because I was part of a team that was working to fix it, and we had our laughs and our good ideas, and it was nothing like being chained to a sinking ship while being eaten alive by filthy-minded ants (aka, nothing like the last job) so that was nice.

Also, about a week ago my agent told me that Borders was pulling Heart of Veridon from the shelves as part of their post-holiday inventory reduction. I immediately checked my local area Borders online, and they all still showed as being in stock, so the sting wasn't felt right off. Today I checked again, at the end of the day, and sure enough all but one of the Chicagoland stores show as out of stock. And some of those were autographed copies, too. Is the suck.

But the good! Ah, the good.

I have seen the final cover for The Horns of Ruin. It is brilliant. It's different than the cover for Heart of Veridon, which was also brilliant but in a very different way. I am quite pleased to have managed two excellent covers. No, I can not show it to you, but when Pyr makes the cover public I will certainly be spreading the joy here as well.

Oh, and the roof to my office is leaking. That sucks, too. But whatever.

Meditate

This is a little late, but that's in keeping with all things 2009. Here are my thoughts and observations on the year.

There are two events that loom in my mind. I changed jobs, and my first book came out. Big things, and bigger things are coming, but let's start at the beginning of the year.

In January I had been talking to the good folks at DSA for about two months, and had just been told that it wasn't going to be an immediate move. That was discouraging, but there were indications that it was a move they wanted to make, so there was hope for the future. The future ended up being around mid-summer. It was a good decision, but not a permanent one. I'm here until I can work the finances to write full time. That's happening at a reasonable but not breathtaking pace.

The things I like about this job: The people I work with, the final product that we produce, and certain aspects of the corporate culture. Things I dislike: Certain of our clients, the insanely long hours during the busy time, the fact that I'm still working in direct mail. I don't like the things I do, specifically presorting data and keeping current with postal regulations. It's boring. Changing jobs also interrupted my writing schedule. There was a period of time when I was working 60-70 hours, and I just didn't have a drop of creative energy left. It was bad. It will be bad again this year, but at least this time I know it's coming.

Above all, it's not writing full-time. But very little is.

The second thing that impacted my year was the book. That goes back a couple years, but things really started happening in March. Solaris announced they were going up for sale. We did some stuff, tried to move the book, tried to get them to release the rights... a lot of business. It didn't work out the way we were hoping, but hey, the book still came out. Pretty much everything we were worried would happen as a result of the Solaris sale happened, mostly related to sales numbers but especially in distribution and support. This happens. I'm getting on with my life.

Other than the book coming out (which is all sorts of YAY! don't get me wrong) I also sold the second book in the Veridon series and a first book in another series. I'm very excited about both these projects. I'm also getting to the point where I have a lot that I want to do, and I don't have the time to do it. I work all day, I go home, eat dinner, watch a little tv to unwind. Then I write. Some days I'm weak of spirit and only get a little bit of writing done before I log in to WoW or go sit with my wife, or whatever. Some days I have to clean the kitchen, and can't get my act together. There's a lot that I want to be doing and I'm not doing it, just because of time. There will come a point when this changes, but it wasn't last year and it probably won't be this year.

Nothing much else. Here, on the sixth day of the year, I feel like the whole year is accounted for. I know what my writing schedule is going to look like, I'm contractually locked up through December (though I have a little project in mind, and another that might present itself) which is a first.

Oh, I'm probably not going to any conventions this year. Worldcon is in Australia, World Fantasy hasn't impressed me the last couple years, I can't make Dragon*con or Comicon due to work. I'll probably still go to Windycon, just by default. Oh, and I might take a vacation this year. Won't that be quaint.