Sunny today, and currently 44˚.

My new moron detector: "totes."

I did not, yesterday, mean to start some sort of kerfuffle by reporting Threshold's first royalty check. To quote Scott Connors (who said this on my Facebook page last night), "Another writer friend of mine told me once that getting a royalty check is a lot like winning the lottery: the odds are against you, and the take-home amount is never what you expect it to be." Yes. Pretty much. I used to think — back when — that it was just me, and all the rest of the literary world was getting fat off royalty checks. Then a mentor, one many times more successful than me, told me one night that he's never gotten a royalty check. Sure, if I'd only gotten a two- or three-thousand dollar advance then twelve years would not have passed before a royalty check turned up. But I don't live off royalty checks. I live off advances. That's how it works for most authors. It's why we have to write so goddamn much. I was amused by the arrival of the check. It was certainly not cause for alarm. Or outrage. Penguin has kept the novel in print for twelve years (as of November 1, 2013) and even allowed me to produce a revised text (the one out now), and I am grateful for that. That's what's truly remarkable here, not the check. So, it's cool, guys. Save words like "travesty" for actual travesties.

I'm pretty sure I could have done a better job with that paragraph. But my brain is still crackling post-Lamictal and precision keeps slipping through my fingers. I expect that will be the case for quite some time to come.

Anyway...onwards.

Somehow I managed, yesterday, to dump all the music off my iPod. We're talking thousands of songs. Thousands. Today, I have begun the process of reloading it. I'll be lazy about that. I'll get on just enough for whatever I'm writing at the moment, and for gaming. I'm not about to try and restore the thing all at once. It would take a week of doing little else.

Oh, and we crossed the river to the Avon and saw John Krokidas' Kill Your Darlings (2013). Brilliant, and a delight. I was pleasantly surprised by Daniel Radcliffe's performance as a young Allen Ginsberg, and Ben Foster was eerily good as William Burroughs. Highly recommended.

I spent the evening in The Secret World. Most of my evenings the past two weeks have been spent as Isobel. It's just easier that way.

We're only two weeks into the new year, and already my schedule is a wreck. Here's what I have to do yesterday:

1. Finish Cherry Bomb (which means taking it apart, but hopefully not starting over).
2. Come up with an actual story to go with the title, Alabaster: The Good, the Bad, and the Bird.
3. Write my story for Neil Clarke's Upgraded anthology.
4. Write something for for and produce Sirenia Digest #96.

Okay. I should not have actually written that out. I'm gonna go lie down. Or write. Or something.

Behind Herself,
Aunt Beast