Step Into My Parlor

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Feels like a day with enough swirling good and bad around me that it's probably a good time to share a few likes and dislikes, and let you get to know a bit more about the quirks behind the Nevets.

First, the really exciting news: I've completed Sublimation, just shy of 100K words at this point.  I'm in the middle of one final solo revision, and then I'll be handing it over to a few readers and an editor.  Then, assuming there's not too much major work to be done, I'll begin querying agents.  I'm incredibly excited about this book, a dark psycho-philosophical thriller about rules and gamesmanship in a surreal vortex of violence and personal collapse.

Another good thing going on right now is improved health.  I've not really talked about it or made a  big deal, and I will continue to do neither, but I wanted to share this as an encouragement.  Over the course of the past eighteen months or so I've lost about sixty pounds.  I'm still not at my ideal weight, but I already feel much better, and while I still suffer from terrible allergies and some other health issues, there's no question that I have more energy and stamina to get through the day.

On the other hand, something that frustrates me more than it should.  Things should just do what they're supposed to do. When a door doesn't open, a container holds food other than it's labelled for, or a video glitches and fails, it really jars me.  Even worse, when a book is interrupted by another book . . .

What's that?

Yes, today I received my copy of Stories for Sendai. I asked Rose to take my picture with it when she had a chance, and then, as I was flipping through the pages I started to get confused.  Apparently Michelle and JC had used some excerpts of Thomas Paine's Common Sense and Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland in among the stories.  Strange choices, but editors will be editors.  It seemed extra strange that they included artwork.  Even stranger, that there was a table of contents for Common Sense.  Then, I realized that these weren't excerpts.  They were entire books.  A book nested within a book, nested within a book.  And the interruption was right in the middle of a story.  Jarring.  Frustrating.  Agonizing.

But after a quick conversation with Michelle to confirm that not all the printed volumes were shipping like that, I was able to use the pains-free, questions-free Amazon replacement process and I have a corrected book shipping to me already.  It's being well handled, but it definitely played straight into a hangup of mine.

Charles Frederick Gill,
image by Leslie Ward
for Vanity Fair (1891)

On a more ambiguous note, without reference to any specifics, I will also say that the past few days (between Battlestar Galactica and the news), I've been once again reminded just how much I get into jurisprudence.  I don't mean trial news or courtroom drama.  I mean the actual legal, philosophical, and ethical nuances which go into the operations of a legal system, especially our American adversarial system.  Always gets my heart beating just a little faster.  Even when I was just tutoring students in comm law, which is pretty dang boring.  Jurisprudence really is, in its own right, a battle between rules and gamesmanship, both of which I adore.

Little known fact: There was a time I was thinking seriously about law school, but was frightened off mostly by the money.

Less known fact: When I was thirteen or so, I checked out several volumes of the Indiana code and read through them so that I could understand the difference in nuance between larceny, burglary, and grand theft.

And then, ending on a really positive note: I got to have a brief exchange with writer and Twitter-friend Shopgirl about the Chinese langauge today and how cool the Beijing accent is.  Makes me grin.  I really don't understand it, but there's no denying it: as much as I enjoy other languages, there's something about Mandarin Chinese that just hits deep inside me and resonates from head to toe.

.Nevets.