16 March 2005

Mark and I are going to Omaha this weekend to see my folks and grands. It turns out my Onie will be coming down from Sioux Falls to see us while we're there, too, so that'll be good. Usually she spends Easter with them, and we can't this year because of Minicon, so I didn't know if we'd miss her.

I can see the end of this pass of revisions from here. I can, I can. And it's a good thing, too, because I need to set it down for awhile and let the alpha readers gnaw on it and think about other fiction. Newer, shinier fiction. Fiction that does not drive me up the proverbial wall and halfway across the proverbial ceiling where I hang like the fruit bat of a different proverbial entirely. But now is not the right time to take a break from this book. Taking a break now would leave yet another proverb hanging over my head waiting to slice me in half. (Proverbs. Like metaphors, they're bad for you.) Now is the time to put my head down and bull through it.

I should be able to bull, right? I've been told I'm full of bull. That must be what they meant.

I'm at a stage where everything is starting to look like I am ruining it. That should be said in one's best snotty seven-year-old voice: "Don't! You're ruining it!" And I may be, but the ways in which I'm ruining it are necessary for it to be less ruined later, if so, so we'll just have to deal with the inner seven-year-old whining. Well, I will. I don't suppose you really have to, when it comes down to it.

I'm reading Ellis Peters's An Excellent Mystery. So far it is not. So far it is a fine book but not a mystery at all. I expect someone to die of foul play any moment now and make it at least a fine mystery, but excellent...well. It's no better than the last one, and she didn't call that excellent. Still, it's also no worse than the series average so far, so that's something. And also it isn't the last of the Lymond Chronicles. I'll probably get to that soon, but I think reading 1370 pages of it without anything else in the queue would have done some really alarming things to my brain. Not entirely bad things, but definitely alarming things.

My own book is doing enough alarming things to me, I think. We are not undergoing an alarm shortage here.