Day in the Life of an Idiot

So you can find my alter ego over at "Something Wicked..." talking about my addiction to Internet research, a topic for which I must give partial credit to swords_and_pens, since we both suffered at Cafe Amore the day the internet was down.

Tate has also been doing interviews all over "town," and if you want a fairly comprensive list, I just made one over at her MySpace site. (That, btw, is one seriously messy url. Let me know if you can't get there.)

Over the last few days, I wrote a few more pages on the prequel. For some reason, this has been slow going. Instead, I've been playing Spider Solitare, which is a complete waste of time, so I can't quite figure out why I've been drawn to that instead of a project I was initally extremely excited about. I think that part of my problem is just that. The prequel means A LOT to me, so I want it to be good. When I start worrying about the quality of my writing, my production slows to a crawl. It's not that I don't worry about writing quality on my Tate projects, but I'm more willing to have crappy first drafts. I need to remember (and embrace) the fact that that writing badly at first is just part of the process -- no matter what book I'm writing. I'm going to have to do some serious output on RESURRECTION CODE, because I plan to hand out chapters to Wyrdsmiths on Thursday.

In other news, I need to get a haircut.

I didn't go to Fourth Street Fantasy this weekend. I'll be interested in reading people's con reports (I know jiawen went, and I'm hoping to coax something out of her.) Wyrdsmiths had talked about attending, but I think most of us wanted to go for somewhat dubious reasons (think various writer/fan squabbles,) and honestly, the weekend kind of snuck up on me.

I spent a lot of time this weekend reading about fish. I learned something I might try. I've been using a product to soften the tetra's water which works pretty well, but, of course, with the heater and the flourescent bulb there's evaporation, and every time I top off I add "hardness." One of my books suggested using distilled water to top off tanks. You can't, of course, use it for water changes because, you need to have SOME minerals in the water not to mention all that organic gunk that people don't like to think they're drinking, and it would be ridiculously expensive. But, I'm thinking it might work for topping off. I'm going to give it a try at any rate. My tetra, btw, are very happy. I finally found a good bulb (another brilliant thought: why not use one of those energy efficent flourescent bulbs?? It seems to be working.) Seven of them school. I've got one that's getting bullied off to a corner, which all my books say is a bad sign -- though I don't see any evidence of illness. I've been watching him, though.

I found out too, that my White Cloud Mountain Minnow (Kenya) was described as "a poor man's neon tetra" by one of my books, which I really rather liked. The goldfish Bob[2], Joe, and Fergus all say "hello." They seem to be quite happy and healthy, though Joe is convinced I NEVER feed him. (He swims to the feeding corner of the tank every time he sees me and nearly jumps out of the tank to get my attention.)

Mason spent the weekend playing "Where is in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" with me. He's been asking to wear red (like Carmen) and will randomly announce that he's the world's greatest jewel thief and run off with various items to hide around the house (currently he has the cover to the flour bin under his bed, which I must retreive soon.) He wants us to call him Carmen and will call me Agent Shadow Hawkins (the boy ACME agent) and Shawn is Jules (the girl ACME agent, and former partner of Carmen) most times, though he's pretty fast and loose with that.

We also picked up a number of cool board games at a rummage sale this weekend, which Mason and Shawn played during breaks from "Carmen."

I also finished the last of my Secret Invasion books and so am now starting to rumminate about what I might write for Bill's Mid-Ohio Comic Con blog... Oh, and in other comic news, I found a website so devoted to news about Captain America that they pulled a very tiny quote by Tate in which she mentions the books she's reading.