We were watching an episode of Quantum Leap yesterday where the guy wanders around the disco era for a while, and some woman gives him a mood ring. I had one of those once. I wish I knew what happened to it. It would have pretty much run the color spectrum this week, from irritation to depression to despair to lethargy to relative optimism.
At work, I'm dealing with an extremely high-maintenance author who doesn't seem to understand the concept of deadlines. On Wednesday, someone sent her a note that said, "This is it, if you want us to print it by the date of your conference, you have to stop making changes now and let us print it." Well, I guess she doesn't care about her conference, because at 6 p.m. Friday she told us a new round of changes was coming. I'm still having a hard time adjusting to this non-news-format mentality. I kind of miss the days where you wrote it once, then if something changed, you wrote an update. (I think part of my grumpiness about this is that I'm also missing the days when I didn't work days. It's getting harder and harder to get up in the mornings -- which is funny, given it wasn't all that long ago I was getting up at 4 a.m. for work. Now it's a struggle to be up by 7. I suppose I should go to bed earlier.)
At home, I'm facing a weird combination of lethargy and setback. I should mow the lawn, but Oh, God, I'd have to get out the mower. Then I set a time and rev myself up to get the mower, and it's raining. We spent much of yesterday out shopping, but then last night our washing machine flooded the basement, which means more shopping that would have been easier to do yesterday.
Not Your Average Blogger started his new job, but I don't have much to say about that because he hasn't. He posts a lot of stuff on Twitter, though.
The Young Prince made it through a week of drama camp relatively unscathed. I was a little disappointed to go to his recital thingie on Friday and watch him wander through his paces without smiling once and forgetting one of his lines, and yet when I pressed him afterward he swore he was having fun and was eager to go back. I suppose it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if he wound up being some kind of geek other than Drama Geek -- I find that sort rather tiresome, myself.
And then there's the writing. I think about it constantly, but I feel like all my ideas are horrible. I write stuff I think might be good, but then I run out of time or energy and it's very hard to get back into the frame of mind for (fill in the blank of whichever thing I think I should be working on). I sent several queries out for one book over a month ago and received one rejection and dead silence from the rest, all of whom are supposed to have a "we will contact you with rejections" policy. I'm not sure if it's worth my time to follow up, as I am told by an agent who would know that books about 14-year-olds fall through the cracks as being too old for middle grade but too young for YA, and I should make the characters sophomores. This is a huge paradigm shift; essentially it would be an entirely different book. It exhausts me to think about.
On the plus side, I began a new diet and I've lost four pounds since Wednesday. I suppose this may account for my moodiness to some extent. But it's nice in that first week to step on the scale and see it heading the right direction each time. Wonder how long that will last.
We have seen two movies of late. The first was RIPD, which I liked quite a bit. It was sort of Men in Black with dead guys instead of aliens. Some nice writing and nice ideas. I sort of wish Jeff Bridges had been a wee bit less Rooster Cogburn-y, but that's a pretty small nit to pick. Yesterday we saw Pacific Rim. It was ... big. Lots of big things fighting other big things with big noise. Brain candy, decently executed. (Although I will admit that when the big boss gave his Crispin's Day speech and ended with "Today we will cancel the apocalypse" all I could see in my head was a Monty Python skit. "Sorry, no, they've called off the apocalypse today. Go on home. Come back tomorrow, maybe we'll have one then." "What do you mean, canceled?! I sold off all my belongings and waited in line for days!" I mean, really, the skit almost writes itself.)
Anyway, the upcoming week is going to bring more of the same -- work, camp, commuting. And maybe a new washing machine. Life in the fast lane.
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