Saturday, December 14, 2002
A startling discovery. Some days, the cryosphere is much more active than others. On these days, it may have a maximum thickness of two feet or more, and sends chilly prominences even higher into the lukewarmosphere. At the moment, my feet are sunk deep in the cryosphere, which only laughs at the foolish conceit of my usually warm black-and-white stripy tights.
Sigh.
The last two days have been a bit of a mess. Struggling to get myself back into the routine necessary to get my writing done and being thwarted at every turn by the Necessary and the Unavoidable. On Thursday, for example, someone shows up to install the Direct TV dish (I only resorted to Direct TV because the local cable provider, ComCast, didn't carry the Sci-Fi Channel unless you got digital, and digital was unavailable in my area - which only matters because there are still eleven episodes of Farscape to go) and instead of taking about an hour, which is what we'd expected, he took [i]four frelling hours[/i] to get the job done. So, while he's banging about the roof and windows and in the living room, there's also workmen in the bathroom tinkering with the plumbing. Meanwhile, the painters are scraping some sort of protective covering from all the easterly-facing windows. Then, because this was obviously not distraction enough, the cat gets another abcess on her butt and we have to drop everything (as soon as the Extremely Slow Direct TV Guy is finally finished) and take her to the vet! I think that the sum total of the work I was able to get done on Thursday consisted of responses to a few e-mails and, late that night, sitting down and proofreading Bast #3.
On Friday, yesterday, I had an appointment in frelling Birmingham and so we had to drive back there (ugh) and didn't get home until about 9 p.m. So, needless to say, no work was done yesterday. Well, that's not quite true. From about 10 p.m. until about midnight I tried, unsuccessfully, to finish the Farscape article for SFSite.Com, to meet the deadline at noon today. Despite a can of Sobe Adrenaline, I was just too exhausted, my head too fuzzy, and I finally had to concede defeat and give up on the piece. Almost nothing pisses me off like defeat, or failure, or coming up short, or whatever you want to call it, especially when that means missing a writing deadline. In my entire career as a writer, I've only had to cancel on editors three times. The first time was in late 1996 and it was because I was stuck in Death's Little Sister; missing the deadline was a wake-up call that I had to choose the band or my writing. The last two cases have both been in the last ten days: first, it was necessary for me to pull out of the Cemetery Dance anthology, Taverns of the Dead, because I knew I didn't have time to get the story written, and now this thing with SFSite.Com. It's embarrassing, unprofessional, and, as I've said, pisses me off.
There is no greater asset to an author than time. Time is that magical thing that there is never enough of, that upon which everything hinges. Every letter I type is a second, a word a handful of seconds, a paragraph perhaps an hour, and so it goes. You lose time and the writing stops. The writing eats time like a bull hippo in a cabbage patch and must be fed. A writer who does not have time to write is not a writer. All of which is my indirect way of saying that, as of this afternoon, the moving chaos ends, whether or not the boxes are unpacked and the pictures hung and the bloody, frelling plumbing is functional. Today I go back to being Caitlín the writer, first and foremost and no more bullshit.
Yesterday, on the drive, I read more Derleth — "The House in the Valley" and "The Sandwin Compact." It's easy to pretend that reading is part of working (but, in honest moments, it must be admitted that this is a falsehood and only writing is truly working).
Last night, I watched the rather awful Wes Craven Presents Dracula 2000. There was a halfway interesting fight at the end, and the opening sequence was fairly nice, but mostly it was an exercise in silliness. The movie was over at about 3:30 a.m., I think, and I dragged myself off to bed. Tonight, after I work (back to TFoC before Bill Schafer sends someone around to break my legs - never break an author's thumbs, just her legs), I'm going to see Star Trek: Nemesis.
And, now, because time is that thing that there will never be enough of, I will end this blogger entry, as it's 12:26 p.m. and the day is already slipping away from me. Oh, wait. Thanks to Steve Burnett for fixing the Farscape Chain Reaction banner ad, divesting it of the superfluous apostrophe.
|
|
