Shanna Swendson's Blog, page 148

The Draw of Saturday-afternoon TV

I know it's a holiday, but I tend to treat Labor Day like a second New Year's Day, a kind of fresh start in a new year, even though I'm not in school, and so I don't want to wait to dive into all those new things I want to accomplish. I'm also trying to stay a little bit more in a regular schedule so that I don't suffer too badly from the "what day is it?" confusion.

I've mostly had a quiet weekend. Saturday I spent more time in front of the TV than I planned, but I got sucked into a marathon of a series called "Secrets" on the Smithsonian channel. They take some artifact with a lot of legend around it and use modern science to analyze it. There was one on the "Spear of Destiny" that's in an Austrian museum and is said to be the lance that pierced the side of Christ at the crucifixion. That was debunked by spectrum analysis that showed the metal was from well after that time and was medieval rather than Roman. It was probably never used as a functional spear, but did seem to have been used to carry a banner. However, the other legend that it contains a nail from the cross wasn't entirely debunked. There did seem to have been something inserted, and markings on it indicate that it was believed to be significant to Christians. That doesn't necessarily mean it really was a nail from the actual cross, just that people believed it was. They can't get to any nail that's in there without taking it all apart, so that's not happening. But in analyzing the piece and records relating to it, it seems that the power of the spear was originally just supposed to be the nail, and it probably was carried into battle with a banner on it as something to rally around that gave people a psychological boost. It was a later king who took that legend and added to it, claiming it was the spear at the crucifixion and wrapping it in gold with an engraving to that effect. Then there was an episode about Blackbeard's ship and whether a wreck they found might have been it, based on the analysis of artifacts found and a comparison to records. They were using large-scale X-ray, MRI, etc. I was really fascinated by an episode about what was purported to be a Norse map of North America from before Columbus. The map itself appears to have been an expert forgery (though there is room for doubt), but the information it contains is actually supported by archeological evidence of Norse settlements in North America. So it's a fake that represents truth that probably wasn't written down.

I really should do more reading/research into Norse history and mythology because with my name it would have built-in branding. And Norse mythology goes way beyond the standard Odin/Thor/Loki stuff. Most Norse-based fantasy seems to stop there.

In between all these, I also got sucked into a Hallmark Channel movie. I have that bizarre addiction to those kinds of Christmas movies, but it turns out they make them all year long, and since they don't seem to be making romantic comedies for the big screen that aren't gross-out, raunchy stuff, this is about the only place to scratch that itch. I caught one that was apparently part of their wave of Valentine's Day movies (who knew?) called I Do, I Do, I Do, and it had the rather brilliant premise of being a Groundhog Day story about a woman reliving her wedding day over and over again. I'm a sucker for Groundhog Day stories, so I gave it a shot. It wasn't bad as those things go, though it was one of those "the wrong guy for the wrong reasons" premises, and it's hard to pull that off without the heroine looking like a jerk or a twit. Jilting a guy at the altar is a bad move, so they have to make the guy look pretty awful to justify it, but then if he's that awful, she looks like a twit for not realizing how awful he is until they're at the altar. In this case, they tried to give her a backstory that explained her choice, that she saw him as a "safe" option without risk -- but considering he more or less steamrollered her into getting married, let his mother plan the entire wedding without even consulting her, then chided her about hurting his mother's feelings when she dared to suggest that maybe she should get some say in her own wedding, there were so many red flags that he didn't seem at all like a safe option. Still, it was a cute movie with some fun moments that made a good backdrop for ironing and folding laundry.

This made me once again think that I could totally write one of these and do a better job.

But now I need to dive into my "new year" so I can let myself play this afternoon and evening.

Kicking off the Holiday

I'm ready to start my Labor Day holiday weekend. I have no plans, a pile of books, ingredients for baking, and some music. I also have bad allergies right now. Ragweed isn't showing up in the pollen count, but I feel very, very ragweedy. I've got the drips and drainage, the itchy skin, the burning eyes, and that weighted-down sense of fatigue.

The pile of books and the music come thanks to my new greatest temptation. They opened a Half-Price Books next door to the grocery store, and they were having their extra 20% off sale this weekend. They got me before I even got in the door with their clearance CD rack, where I managed to snag several CDs of things that I have on cassette but now can't listen to in my car, plus some good writing background music. I also found a book I've been searching for and haven't found anywhere, a cookbook, and a few books I've read from the library but haven't found in stores. And I didn't even delve all that deeply. I didn't get a cart or a basket, so I limited myself to what I could carry.

Now, though, I'm utterly exhausted from my exertion. I should probably have started the daily Allegra a few days earlier because it will take a few days to kick in. I hope it kicks in soon because I'm singing in the chorale on Sunday. We're doing a fun little Renaissance piece.

I traditionally use Labor Day weekend as a brainstorming/research/mood setting retreat for the next project to kick off, so I need to decide which movies in my collection most remind me of the book I'm about to write. I'm not sure there's yet been a really good steampunk movie, so when I was planning the first book I mostly viewed things set in that time period.

A Catch-up Round-up

I have a title! Book 3 in the Fairy Tale series, now known as A Kind of Magic, will be arriving November 24 (tentatively -- depends on Audible). The cover art is done, so I should soon have a cover to share. The fun thing is that it takes place around the time of the release date. It's not quite full-on Christmassy -- it happens before Thanksgiving, but the production of The Nutcracker starts during the book, and there's already Christmas stuff out.

This may mean that the next book will be a full-on Christmas book, so maybe I'll plan for that release date next year. Assuming I get the book written by then. I need to write another Rebel Mechanics book in the meantime.

I guess that since I had to go straight from getting home from the convention to working on the book, I'm now having my post-convention recovery period. I've been mostly useless the last couple of days, though I did do some FenCon PR work. I got sidetracked into hypothetical vacation planning. That involved going to various travel and tourism sites, searching for what I wanted, then checking the review sites. It seems that what I really wanted doesn't exist. I wanted to do a road trip to the minor mountains in eastern Oklahoma/western Arkansas, and I wanted a hotel like the one I had near Hot Springs last year, where I had a balcony overlooking the lake. My favorite part of the trip was getting up in the morning and drinking tea on the balcony. But it seems that no hotel like that exists in the places where I was looking. I came up with a few alternate possible plans, but then I got a tip from a friend about a place to go that looks like it might fit the bill for a quiet getaway. Now I'll do more research.

In choir news, I did put myself forward for that Requiem solo, and the director came up with an interesting way to deal with it, since there were multiple people wanting it. It's divided into multiple pieces, separated by choir parts, and he's giving the different pieces to different people. I got the middle part that's my favorite part of it, anyway, and I don't have to worry about the really high notes. My writer brain has kicked in, and I already have a narrative for it in my head that suddenly makes the piece make more sense this way. If it's one person doing the solo, it's just the one person offering the prayer at what essentially sounds like a mass funeral (one of the repeated lines translates to "grant them rest eternal"), though since we're doing it for All Souls Day, I suppose it's about all the people who've gone on before us. But with multiple people, I'm picturing a number of people in a cathedral, all praying, and then the spotlight falls on one person offering her prayer, goes back to the crowd, then falls on another person. The different pieces of the solo all have a different tone, so you can imagine them being sung by different characters.

I may get a story out of this.

And in other news, I found this list of inspiring real-life geeks</i>, and would you believe who's on it? Yeah, I'm listed among people like JK Rowling. Kind of cool.

While I have stuff to do in the next couple of days, I think I'm going to treat the time up to (and including) Labor Day as a quasi-holiday, with the weekend itself being real holiday. Then I'm going to hit the ground running afterward and really try to be diligent and productive. I need to make a conscious effort to do more promotion, and I need to do a better job of staying on top of the writing. I have too many stories in my head that need to be let out. My pastor's sermon series lately has been based on the "first things first" concept -- that illustration where if you fill a jar with water, sand, and pebbles, you can't fit any rocks in, but if you put the big rocks in first, then add pebbles, sand, and water, you can actually fit more in the same jar -- and I've realized I need to do a better job of focusing on my priorities.

Good Beginnings

I helped with a couple of writing workshops this summer, which meant I was reading beginnings of novels, and that has me thinking a lot about what makes a beginning work. Here are some suggestions:

1) Save the backstory for later
I think this is the number-one problem with most beginner manuscripts. Writers feel like they need to explain the entire background of their world, exactly how it works, what the history is, and the main character's entire history before the story can start. This bogs down the beginning. It's better to show all this through action as the protagonist interacts with his/her world or notices what's wrong about it that needs to be fixed. And no, characters having a conversation about the history of their world is not a way to get around this, especially if both of them know the history already. Give us just enough information to understand the inciting incident and how it affects the protagonist. We don't need to know about the hero's childhood and relationship with his parents or about the war that was fought a century ago unless that's absolutely critical to understanding the inciting incident and how the hero reacts to it. Unanswered questions and curiosity can keep readers turning pages, as long as there's eventually some kind of payoff.

2) Give your protagonist a goal
Not just a story goal, though that should come as soon as possible in the book, but some goal, wish, or need that exists before the story kicks off and that would have been there even if this particular story hadn't happened. I think this is a big reason that villains are so often more popular than the heroic characters. You know from the start that the villain wants something, while the hero is often just reacting to the villain's actions without actually wanting anything. Having a goal can also create additional conflict for the protagonist because that initial goal might conflict with the story goal, and he has to make a choice.

The initial goal might be something that's focused and expanded by the story goal -- when we meet Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars, he wants to go to the Academy with his friends, mostly because he wants to get off that sandbox of a planet and have adventures. Then after he meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, his story goal is to get the Death Star plans to the Rebels so they can destroy it. So it fits his initial goal of getting off the planet and having adventures, but in a more purposeful way. The initial goal can also be contradicted by the story goal. In the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy initially wants to go "somewhere over the rainbow." She gets that very quickly, realizes she doesn't really want it, after all, and her story goal is to get back home. And the initial goal might be in conflict with the story goal. You see that a lot in romances, where the heroine initially just wants a promotion at work or to get a date with the guy she likes, and then she meets the hero and is torn because she likes him, but being with him requires her to reconsider her other goal.

It's also good if the protagonist's story goal is positive and proactive, rather than reactive. Instead of the goal being to stop the villain, which puts the villain in the driver's seat, there's a specific plan for stopping the villain that has nothing to do with the villain's actions. Going back to Star Wars, the goal is to get the plans to the Rebels and find a weakness rather than the goal being simply to stop the Empire, which would have had them running about, reacting to everything Darth Vader did.

3) Avoid flashbacks
I was surprised by how many manuscripts I critiqued this summer that started with some big, exciting incident and then flashed back to the start of the story. This is a common TV series storytelling structure that I think has become overused even on TV, and I don't think it works as well in a book. If you're using it, you should have a very good reason for doing so that's integral to the story, and you have to be careful about how you use it.

On TV, they can get away with starting with a big, exciting scene with a cliffhanger ending, then after the opening credits flashing up the "24 hours earlier" caption and going back to the beginning because unless you've recorded the show, you're stuck watching as it goes. In a book, it's easy to just skip ahead to see how that cliffhanger comes out. In a TV series, usually the viewer already knows the characters pretty well and knows what to expect of them, and that opening scene is usually shocking because it's something we know those characters would never do (like the cop hero shooting his partner), so we want to keep watching to find out what the real story is. In the opening of a novel, unless the novel is part of a series, we don't know enough to know whether or not this is shocking behavior for these characters, so it loses impact. This kind of opening is also bad about losing all energy once you leave that opening scene and flash back to the beginning. It's easy to put the book down then because everything that comes afterward seems boring in comparison. Plus, I think too many writers use the exciting opening as an excuse to then start the main story a lot earlier and fit in a lot of backstory before getting to the inciting incident, like if they start with a bang that gives them a license to be more leisurely about starting, and that makes matters even worse. And I suspect that this looks to editors and agents like a ploy to send the most exciting part of the book while sticking to the request for the first chapter or first three chapters.

Unless you really know what you're doing and you have a solid story reason for doing so, it's better to start at the beginning, as close to the inciting incident as possible, and find a way to make that opening scene interesting or exciting in its own right.

New Habits

I got my proofreading done. I then celebrated by going to the dentist this morning, where I brainstormed titles while having my teeth cleaned. Yeah, I really know how to live it up.

Now I just have to remember where my life was before it was interrupted by books and travel. I need to get back to doing more promo stuff. I need to clean my house. I need to get back into my routines, which have changed.

It's funny how little changes have big ripple effects. Take my ballet class. For years, it's been on Tuesday nights. This year, it's on Thursday. That's changing my laundry schedule. I used to do my laundry on Mondays because I needed my ballet stuff Tuesday night and it has to air dry, so I needed to give it an overnight for drying. Then I washed my sheets and towels on Tuesdays because I knew I'd be washing my hair that night after ballet class (I have this weird thing about not liking to go to bed on clean sheets without having washed my hair). The move to Thursdays shouldn't affect my laundry schedule that much. There's no reason I can't still do my regular laundry on Mondays. I think I'll move my sheets and towels day to Thursday, though, and remaking the bed can be part of a general spiffing-up before the weekend. It's also going to affect the way I view the weekend. I often felt like the hard part of the week was over after choir on Wednesday night, so Thursday was like the pre-weekend, but having something to do on Thursday pushes that back.

The new phone is also changing some habits, mostly because it's a lot more useful as a music player than my old phone was. I can plug it into my living room stereo and have all my playlists, which means I'm listening to a lot more music while I cook , work, or eat because I don't have to grab my computer and plug it in or pick a single CD. I need a different kind of adaptor to plug the phone into the stereo in my office because its line in requires stereo audio cables. I thought I had one of those adaptors from my old DVD player, but I can't think of where it is. Yes, I can play the same music on my computer, but I keep my computer sound off so I don't hear stuff like e-mail and Facebook alerts.

I realized how big an effect a habit change can have while I was listening to the piped-in music at the dentist's office. My awareness of popular music tapers off starting at about 2000, when I quit commuting, and comes to an abrupt stop in 2008. That's because I learned about pop music by listening to the radio on my way to and from work, and I still listened to the radio in the car unless I was on a long road trip and brought along my cassette collection. I got a new car in 2008 that played MP3 CDs, and after just a few weeks of having the car, I took a road trip. For that trip, I made an MP3 CD with at least ten hours of music, and it was like listening to the radio but getting to choose all the songs. I ended up just leaving the CD in the car. Since then, I occasionally switch out CDs -- I make new "road trip" mixes every so often, and I do book "soundtracks" -- but I completely stopped listening to the radio. I don't even have any stations set on my car radio. At the dentist, I was perking up when something from the 80s or 90s came on, but then there was stuff that was entirely unfamiliar, and I knew it had to be newer. So, yeah, getting a new car totally changed my awareness of music. Now I'm looking forward to taking a road trip with my new phone, where I can make up a playlist without having to burn a CD, or I can just set the whole library on shuffle, or I can change playlists to fit mood or scenery.

Meanwhile, using the phone for music means I have it out more and have discovered the other tools on it, so I'm making a lot more use of it than I did my old phone (which also didn't have all the same tools). Now if only it would organize my life.

Down to the Wire

I'm down to the wire in getting this book done. I have a couple of hundred pages to read, so that means I'll be busy today! I wish I'd done more this weekend, but it was a busy weekend, with a convention planning meeting on Saturday and singing in three services Sunday. That meant I had to get up early, didn't really get a break all morning because I was running from service to service, and then was dead tired when I got home. So today there will be work. Lots of work.

And then tomorrow I'll mostly have this book off my back. I still need a title and I need back cover copy, and I'll have to review cover designs and interior layouts.

But once this book is done, I have some convention work to do and then I need to get really busy on my next YA steampunk proposal. I think, though, that I'm going to take some time to clean the house. That's good for brainstorming and thinking, and right now, the place looks like it's been ransacked. I haven't really been noticing because my head's been in a book for so long, but it suddenly struck me, and after a week in a hotel, it's starting to bother me. My sofa in particular is a mess of promo stuff I was putting together, newspapers I've been catching up on, and notes and notebooks relating to my various books. There's that one little spot where I can sit. That will be a good way to clear my head while I switch between genres.

Now, it's time to dig into the proofreading. I'm liking this book a lot as I read it. There are moments that really hit me, and I'm already getting scenes in my head that I want to put in a future book. No concrete external plot yet, but I know what I want to have going on in the character arcs.

Title Crisis

I've made it through round one of copyedits. Now I want to re-read the entire book for a final sanity check. I still need a title. I worked for about an hour on that last night, searching Bartlett's Quotations with key words, skimming through Shakespeare, looking at the AFI's top movie titles, looking at lists of top songs, reading fairy tales, and all the usual things I do to come up with titles. And I'm still drawing mostly a blank. I have one or two ideas that are kind of stuck in my head, and while I don't like them, I don't seem able to move past them.

I would say that I'm having more trouble coming up with a title than I had writing the book, but I had a lot of trouble writing the book, too.

One strange effect of this book: It's given me a craving for petit fours. There's a tea party scene in the book, and I find myself vividly imagining those little iced cakes. I kind of want to try making them, but that wouldn't be a good use of my time right now. Maybe I'll run to Kroger and see if they have any. That's the only way I'll get through reading that scene one more time. Maybe that will inspire me to come up with a title!

In other news, I have a little booklet with the first chapter of the next/final Terry Pratchett book, which was just released in the UK. I'm not sure of the US publication date. But I don't think I want to read the first chapter without having the rest of the book handy. It would be just too frustrating. So I'll keep the booklet, knowing I have it.

In the meantime, I've been re-reading a lot of the other books, which got me out of a reading slump I'd been in. I guess I could read something else, since the convention's over, but I don't really want to right now. It's probably best not to get sucked into a book I haven't read before when I have so much work to do.

WorldCon Report

When I went to choir last night, everyone acted like I'd been missing for ages and they talked about having thought about calling me. I missed one rehearsal and one Sunday. I guess it's nice to be missed. I'll more than make up for it this Sunday (though I did go to a church service at WorldCon, so it's not like I really missed a Sunday) because I'll be singing in three services. I'm in a small ensemble singing in the early service, then that ensemble got drafted into singing backup for the praise band at the contemporary service (new experiences are good for me, I guess), and then I'll be singing with the choir at the late service.

The choir director said if we were interested in singing the soprano solo for the "Pie Jesu" in the Rutter Requiem, we should talk to him. I'm pondering it. I suspect he'll end up going with one of the grad students, but if they want that ethereal "boys choir" sound like in the British version, my voice comes closer in the upper range. It goes pretty high, but I've sung a solo in that range before.

So, WorldCon … I'm still too lazy to go downstairs and find my phone to transfer pictures, and I didn't take too many pictures of anything actually at the convention. Most of my photos are of the river and waterfalls. After my last on-the-spot report, I went to the dance lessons and steampunk ball, which were held in a lovely ballroom in a historic hotel (photo on my phone). As usual, there was an extreme lack of men. Seriously, guys, step up. You get bonus points on your man card for being able to lead in ballroom dancing. After two hours of lessons, I was getting pretty tired, and when I was feeling wallflowery for the ball itself, I slipped out about midway through. Good thing, since I could barely walk the next morning. I didn't take a walk then.

I had a panel Friday morning on the Terry Pratchett books for younger readers, and one of the panelists was the editor. I learned a lot about writing for younger readers from hearing what she had to say and what she reported as Terry Pratchett's views on the subject, and now a lot of the editorial notes I got on my YA book make so much more sense. Retroactive apologies to my editor for all my grumbling. I had my kaffeeklatsch that afternoon, and while I didn't have a waiting list, like a lot of authors, I did have a fairly full table, and we had a nice discussion. I did a little hanging out and wandering through the dealers room after that, then headed back to my hotel to discover that we'd suddenly been transported to Mars.

As you've probably heard, there are a lot of wildfires in that region, and that day the winds brought all the smoke into Spokane. It was like being in a dense fog that smelled like a campfire. The sky was hazy and yellow, and you could barely see across the street. They were warning people to stay indoors. So I did. I hit the swimming pool and hot tub for a while, and then they served an awesome chicken and rice soup at the hotel's evening reception, so I didn't bother going out for dinner. I spent the evening going over my critiques for the writers workshop.

Saturday, I was back to walking. I did the "Stroll with the Stars" walk, which was shorter and slower than I would have gone on my own, but I did get to chat with people along the way. Though I must say that going on a suspension bridge with a large group of people isn't recommended if you have bridge issues. The bridge seemed to be swaying alarmingly. I actually attended a couple of panels that morning, and then I had the writers workshop in the afternoon. That was three hours of intense critiquing that made me really think about my own writing and that had me eager to write. But I came out of it at 7 p.m. utterly drained. I'd thought about going out to dinner, but once I got to my hotel to drop things off, I didn't want to go anywhere. The hotel offered sandwiches, etc., in the area where they served breakfast and the evening reception, so I ordered a French dip sandwich, and the waitress took one look at me and asked if I wanted it boxed up to go to my room. She fixed me a tray with my sandwich and some wine, and I ate while watching a Doctor Who marathon on TV, then collapsed early.

Sunday, I had my final panel and ended up being the moderator at the last minute because the moderator didn't show. I sat at the SFWA table for a shift, and after doing a final round for good-byes, I went back to the hotel to start packing. I went for a very early dinner (switching back to Central time) at a restaurant overlooking the falls and had regional rainbow trout. I seem to be making a tradition of a final night dinner by the water. And then I was up early the next morning for the long flight home.

I probably didn't network as much as I should have because I didn't do the party circuit. I was off on time zones and the party hotel was so far away from everything else. I did make some new friends among the Discworld fan group, and the person coordinating that was staying at my hotel, so we ended up having breakfast together. I'm going to try to connect with that group online. I know that a lot of my promo items were taken from the freebie table, so we'll see how that translates to sales. Whether or not the convention did me any good professionally, I had a good time and I feel like I learned some things.

Time Adjustments

I was scheduled for a writing post today, but I think I'm going to skip a week since I'm still in convention/travel recovery mode (I went to bed last night early for Central time, woke up on Pacific time. I guess I was tired). Forming coherent thoughts isn't working for me.

Meanwhile, I made a good start on the epic to-do list yesterday. I got about a third of the way through going through the manuscript for the copyeditor's notes. I hope to get through the rest today, and then I'll need to do one more thorough read-through. That will be my reading out loud pass and will probably take several days. Most of what she found so far has been minor, including an embarrassingly high number of typos. I might need to increase the size of my screen view because even looking at these, it took me a while to see that a letter really was missing, so it wasn't just that I skimmed past it. I really didn't see it when looking at it. And yes, I did just get my eyes checked.

One question for anyone who lives in New York: In mid-late November, what time does it get dark? I was going off the US Naval Observatory tool where you can enter a date and location and it gives you sunrise and sunset times. According to this, civil twilight for the date in question ends around 5 p.m. Supposedly, that means that any outdoor activities after that time will require artificial light because the disc of the sun is totally below the horizon. The editor, who lives in New York, wasn't sure whether flashlights might be required in the middle of Central Park, away from the lighted paths, after 6 p.m. Since she lives there, she might know better than the computer what it's really like to experience it, but I wanted to get another opinion. It is a cloudy day, so that might make it seem darker. I know when I was there in early December, it seemed to be pitch black before six. Is this a detail that would totally throw you out of the story one way or another?

Now I really should obtain groceries because there's next to no food in the house. I made something for dinner last night with food in the pantry and freezer, and I'd planned ahead to have breakfast items for a couple of days, but now I really need some fresh stuff. I may splurge on some convenience foods to get me through the week of copyedits. Though when the copyedits end, I'll have to jump on developing Rebel Mechanics 2 (tentatively called Rebel Magisters). I think Labor Day weekend may be a research and mood setting retreat.

Home and Back to Work

I'm home from Spokane. I sort of slacked off on reporting because I got busy, and a more complete convention report will have to come later because I came home to lots and lots of work that needs to be done. Suffice it to say that I had an excellent time, and for once, although I was looking forward to being home, I was also a little sad about leaving. I had a fun convention, met new people, learned a lot, and really enjoyed the location. I'm going to miss those cool mornings. It will be months before we're in the upper 50s in the morning, and my neighborhood river is a bit too turgid for waterfalls. I liked the waterfalls.

I also have more photos to post when I remember to bring my phone upstairs and upload them.

The trip home wasn't as bad as I feared, though it did make for a day that felt long. I had one little snag that ended up working in my favor. I had just enough time upon arrival at DFW to catch the earlier train from the airport, but the airport tram to take me from the arrival terminal to the train station shut its door in my face and left without me. I wasn't even running to catch it. I was there waiting for it. I let people off first, as the recorded voice ordered, but then before I could get on, the door slammed shut. I only had to wait about a minute for the next tram, but then I missed the train by one minute. However, since the airport is the end of the line, the next train was already there, and they let us get on board to wait the 15 minutes before departure, and the train was air conditioned. Then I really lucked out in connecting to my neighborhood bus. If you go by the schedule, the train arrives one minute after the bus departs, so you have to wait for the next bus. The train runs every 20 minutes, but at rush hour the bus only runs every half hour. That means you're probably going to wait half an hour or more for a bus, depending on the train you're on. But since the bus was running slightly late, the same bus I would have caught with the earlier train was still at the station and loading when the train arrived, so I stepped off the train and onto the bus and didn't have to wait half an hour for the next one, and that meant my waiting time was in the air conditioned train. So, thank you, rude airport tram.

Highlights of the convention, other than the waterfalls, included meeting some really fun people at the Discworld events, ballroom dancing at the Steampunk ball, people at my kaffeeklatsch so that I felt famous rather than sad and pathetic, and a writers workshop that had me really thinking and inspired, even though I was the one supposedly teaching.

Normally, I would spend a day or two recovering, doing laundry, getting groceries, etc., but I have copyedits due September 1, so I must spend the week (and probably the weekend) working. I also have lots of other stuff that must be done in the meantime. I had grand plans to take care of some things in the evening in my hotel room, but I was so tired that I just couldn't concentrate, and that means I have to catch up now.