Sep
6

Edits in the Red

Posted in blog, copy edits, rambling | 1 Comment
Bleah. So aside from the fact that I woke up with a really wretched sore throat (one I’ve been fighting off for the last few weeks but seemed to have succumbed to, finally.), I have to admit it was a fairly productive long weekend. Sure, I still owe people some blogs posts and a few write ups…but, my copy edits? Hells yeah. I’ve got about 100 pages to go, but I did manage to crank through 250 the last few days. Apparently, my characters snort a lot. Or they did. Not so much at this point. I think I’m going to have to go and do a hard core search for “toward” as well. Reading it as a whole, there seems to be an awful lot of “he turned toward x” or “she moved toward y”.  Most of those are probably unnecessary. In fact, the easy solution (for me, anyway)… Read more
Feb
27

Sickly…

Posted in blog, jewelry, rambling, sick, ye ye | Leave a comment
Both Lucy and I are running fevers tonight, so I suspect there’s a sick day in it for me tomorrow, or at least a day working from home if she’s not feeling any better. She’s definitely got the worst of it at the moment – my temp is running on the edge of uncomfortable with an side order of headache, but it’s manageable. Of course, it would be more manageable if I could actually take drugs for it, but alas, once I start down the road with aspirin or ibuprofen, my prolotherapy goes down the crapper. Anyway, today was good in other ways, as Ye Ye celebrated his 80th birthday. He actually managed to make it out to the Peking Gourmet Inn (if you live near DC, this is *the* place to go for Peking duck, bar none. There’s a reason the walls are lined with photos of celebrities and… Read more
Feb
9

Cotton Head

Posted in blog, blog stuff, rambling, sick | Leave a comment
I hate waking up and realizing I’m on the brink of a cold. It’s not quite here and if I’m really lucky I may be able hide from its snot-loving fingers. The harbingers are unmistakable – the slightly achy head, the almost scratchy throat, post nasal nastiness, the way I suddenly feel like I’m moving in slow motion… Funny how the body has a way of telling you to slow down. I know I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a while now, and I’m definitely not getting enough sleep. (And some of those reasons have less to do with writerly things and more to do with with trying to play through Dragon Age and Awakenings before DA2 comes out next month. So,so, so excited for this game.) On the other hand, life doesn’t stop being life, even with the best of intentions. Connor’s basketball tryouts went on for over… Read more
Feb
6

WTF Sunday

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I had an awesome WTFkery planned for today, but alas, ebay has taken it down. Essentially, a couple of kids had been using their Beyblades in the bathtub. Connor has some of those and they spin pretty hard, but I guess in this case the Beyblades did about $500 worth of damage to the tub and tiles with their spinning, so the pissed off parents were putting up the Beyblades for sale…and they posted a picture of the these two completely devastated boys holding the bag of Beyblades. Sort of priceless, even if it was probably a hoax (Last I saw, the auction was up to about $300, which is way, way more than the toys are worth.). I showed it to Connor and he was, of course, all about the Beyblades. “I hope they don’t get rid of those two that light up. Those are cool.” Indeed. I suppose they are.… Read more
Nov
23

Whither the YA of my Youth?

Posted in books, rambling, YA | 6 Comments
Jeffe and I were speculating the other day as to whether or not the YA genre actually existed when we were growing up (a nebulous period in the 70’s and 80’s, to be specific.) We took it to Twitter and the general consensus was that it didn’t. I started reading at a pretty early age. I know some of my favorites in 3rd and 4th grade were things like Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Little Princess and The Secret Garden…but after that things get a bit hazy. At some point I was handed Piers Anthony’s Xanth series, because I got mono in 4th grade and I distinctly remember not being allowed to participate in recess in the months that followed (which meant a lot of reading.) I remember reading Ogre, Ogre in May of that year, which was the 8th book in that series. Did I get all of his puns?… Read more