Day in the Life of an Idiot

I have to apologize for being so absent from here, of late. I do, at least, have a great excuse: http://wizardstowerpress.com/media/wizards-tower-acquires-unjust-cause-by-tate-hallaway/. I have been frantically revising and rewriting Unjust Cause to get it ready to send to my publisher on November 1.

If you had previously read any of the Wattpad version of this, THIS BOOK IS SUBSTANTIVELY DIFFERENT. The main plot will be familiar, as will some scenes, but the revision I have been doing goes all the way to the bones. This will basically be a brand-new book. Plus, unlike what you read online (if you stuck with it), this book will have an ENDING. (A huge bonus, I would imagine.)

The exciting thing about this for me--besides the obvious excitement of having another book published--is that I've really been enjoying the process. Writing has been fun.

That's what has been occupying a lot of my time. I have also continued to work on the front steps. The very last thing I've been doing is repairing the--I don't know what you call it, it's a feature that brackets the four steps that lead directly to our front door. At any rate, it had been crumbling and losing bits. I basically stuffed putty in the big holes and am now painting the whole thing with a sealant + stain, so it looks more "intentional," as we like to say. To put it another way, the paint is hiding a lot of sins.

Meanwhile, I tried to blow up the house last night. We have radiant heat, which means that every fall, I go around and bleed air out of the radiators and fill up the water reserve to maintain pressure. The water comes into the furnace via this ancient pipe that long ago lost it's knob. So, I have compromised by sticking a wrench on the turn-y bit, which is really quite small. Last night, I had intended to add a tiny amount to the system, like you do, and then go around and equalize everything, and add a tiny bit more, etc., etc., until the pressure is at the right place and all the radiators are spitting water instead of air, right? EXCEPT. The wrench slipped off while the pipe was in full ON position. This is a closed system. So, I was frantically trying to get the wrench back on the tiny little knob and watching the pressure gauge skyrocket. I finally ran upstairs--screaming at my family to grab a bucket--and used the radiator key to kick open a valve. I let water pour onto our floor and ran back down to get the wrench back in place, which I finally did, but then we had to spend the next thirty minutes not only bleeding out all the excess water, but also turning the heat way up so I could be CERTAIN there was room for the expanded volume of HOT water. 

Mason, being the helpful Stephen King fan that he is, kept following me around as I stared at the pressure gauge muttering, "she creeps." (Which, for those who aren't instantly familiar, is a reference to the boiler in the Outlook Hotel from The Shining.) 

This is only made more perfect by the fact that I am a writer. I told my family that they should double check my novel progress to make sure I'm not just typing "All work and no play makes Lyda a dull girl."

So, that was exciting, to say the least.

In fannish news, Yuletide is open for nominations for this upcoming year: yuletide-admin.dreamwidth.org/64764.html. (Only for a few more hours!) I love Yuletide. If you don't know what it is, it's a holiday fic exchange--specifically for fandoms that have less than a thousand works on AO3. If you sign up for a gift, you also have to write one for someone else. 

I have participated for several years as a pinch hitter, though there have been years when I've been unable to snag an assignment because the ones I could write for got snapped up so quickly. In those years, I usually write a treat. This is basically writing only the gift for someone else. Pinch hitters have no official way of receiving a fic in exchange, though there is usually an unofficial site to check out what pinch hitters might enjoy. I normally don't bother, because my fandoms are actually quite huge and I have more than enough fics to keep me happy. I'm in Bleach and Good Omen's fandom. I'm not hurting for stuff to read. :-)

There's so much I love about pinch hitting, but my favorite thing is that I get huge waves of emails that give me a sense of the especially hard to fill fandoms. (To the people who want RPF of Shakespeare, I love all of you!) When I find one I can do, it feels really great. Plus, because of the nature of pinch hitters (someone has had to default on their assignment for some reason or other,) I have to write FAST. I take a huge amount of pride in writing well, quickly. I want my recipient to never know they weren't my original assignment. Plus, it makes me push out the envelope of what I'd normally consider writing for. Thanks to pinch hitting, I've written smut for the LEGOs movie, an epic romance for the Munchkin card game, and a Christmas story for the dating sim "Dream Daddy." This is a resume that makes me deeply proud.

Speaking of things that shouldn't make me proud, but which totally do. I'm going to be at Gaylaxicon next weekend and one of the panels I'm on is going to be a bunch of us playing Chuck Tingle's RPG in front of an audience. If we can't figure out how to be pounded in the butt by our own role-playing game, I will feel vaguely dissatisfied. ;-)

As it is "What Are You Reading Wednesday" here on Dreamwidth, I should also be reporting on the things I've been reading this week, but the honest answer is: ALL MY NOTES FOR UNJUST CAUSE HOLY CRAP UNJUST CAUSE.

So, that's not something I can easily recommend.

There's other stuff going on in my life, too? The good and bad news is: Mason won 4th place at the University of Minnesota's debate tournament last week, I got cool handmade paper from my friends at offcntr , and I have been following with much trepidation the events on Terry A. Garey's CaringBridge Journal. Terry is someone who I consider a writing mentor of mine and she's in a rather bad way--having been hospitalized now for over two weeks with... the doctors aren't really sure, but she hasn't been able to eat or drink much. I've been thinking about her a lot and continue to hope for better news soon.

But, thanks to my renewed friendship with,  rachelmanija I have been paying close attention to the changing of the leaves this season. I've been collecting pictures of some of the trees as they begin to turn all their vibrant colors.