Aigaion, Yet Again

Well, and other stuff too.

I've been going through the final (gruelling) edits of Aigaion Girl for the past couple days. I've also been laying it out as I go so that I don't still have a ridiculous amount of layout work to contend with after I finish edits. Other than the fact that I've become (even more of) an antisocial hermit who has trouble remembering to eat and bathe, I'm having a fair bit of fun.

Mephie is being held together with tape and love, but he's doing very well and I'm proud of him.

I really like the way this book is looking. Really a lot. It manages to look cute but not girly, modern but not unprofessional. I'm quite pleased with myself - and, since I ate my dinner again tonight and am about to shower, I get a gold star.

In other news, my sister had some headshots taken to give to her modelling agency. They're pretty darn good, though I have no idea if they're what the agency is looking for or not. I guess we'll find out. I'm actually thinking that I might (after making use of the gym here for the months between now and May) go to the same agency and see if they've got anything for me. It couldn't hurt, and anyway, then I'd have an excuse to get a bunch of professional pictures taken and not seem totally vain ;)

What else? I'm no longer a housekeeper. There's a whole story there which I won't get into. I now work in the kitchen (well, the hotel is shut down at the moment, which is where I got the time to do the extreme amount of editing I've been doing) as a dishwasher. The su chef is really nice, as is the head chef, so apart from dirty looks from the randomly angry australian chef, I think everything is going to work out fine.

Um, I have a cousin who has H1N1. I guess it's making its rounds. Scary stuff.

Canada's Economic Action Plan is an effing joke.

I think that's close to it. I really need to shower, so I can get up early(ish) tomorrow and get to work.

Some Stuffs

#1: My computer is temporarily fixed! Not that many people knew it was broken, of course, because I couldn't get online to tell anyone I couldn't get online. Ronnie, who is one of my supervisors at work, took it the night before yesterday, and brought it to me last night, having fixed it with duct tape. He is officially my hero.

#2: Because Mephie was on the fritz, my edits on Aigaion Girl had pretty much come to a standstill. I had the day off work today, so I decided to spend some time editing. I was sad for a while, because I'd forgotten my computer was fixed, but then I remembered that it was, and I just finished going back through A/G and changing all of the Canadian spellings to American (the main character is from Philly; I thought it would be weird if she spelled colour c-o-l-o-u-r). Now I'm checking grammatical things and then I think (*knock on wood*) I shall be done (*knock on wood again*).

#3: Room inspection again today. I think we did fine. Whatever.

#4: My computer, my MP3 player and my camera all broke last week. So far, just Mephistopheles has been fixed. The camera is dead for sure, but I'm not sure about my MP3. I was thinking about climbing Burges this week, but I'm definitely not going to without my camera; it would be far too depressing.

#5: I sent a lot of letters home the day before yesterday. I got a post card from my brother and sister-in-law, and it got me in a writing mood. I'm looking forward to sending Christmas cards this year, because there's actually a slight chance I'll get some back.

That's the update for now.

Ugh, but also not Ugh

Updates:

Life in BC is... interesting. My job is a job; it has its pros and cons, like every other. Of course, one of the big pros is location. I can't promise a picture (one of the cons is the craptastic internet access), but it is absolutely beautiful here. Burges, the mountain that I look at every morning when I leave for work, is ginormous and very, very pretty. I looooves it.

I forgot what else I was going to say.

Oh. Right. Aigaion Girl. Edits are coming along nicely. I should be working on them tonight, but I'm sleepy (I had a seizure in my sleep) and there's a birthday party in res tonight, which I guess I'm going to for a bit.

There's probably more, but I'm sooo sleepy. And I miss Clayton.

This Cheers Me Up

Ha ha! On a whim I decided to check my fictionpress traffic. I haven't posted anything since I finished Aigaion Girl, so I was expecting my numbers to be kind of cruddy, but they were actually okay - and I got a new country.

Slovakia is a middle-European country that has been around for ages. It became independent for the second time in 1993 and is doing quite well for itself.

I've got a million to do today, or I would write more. This place does look very interesting. More to follow, eventually.

I Got a Job!

I move to B.C. on Friday.

Royal LePage

Ookie.

So.

Editing. It's coming. It's slow, but it's coming. I'm working of WiliamGodwinizing Moloch, which is taking some doing, but I think is turning out fairly well. I'm almost 45% of the way through editing Moloch. Then I just have... well, every single other character... but I don't think they'll be anywhere near as hard to do, in some ways. I thought Moloch would be the easiest, initially, because I'm changing the way he speaks, not the way he thinks... but changing the way he speaks actually is harder, I think, because I have to do it pretty much one word at a time. Anyway, there's nothing much wrong with the way everyone else thinks, except that their thought processes are too similar, apparently. So I just have to clean that up. I want to be done by the end of the month 'cause I want August to be left for actual content. I think that's realistic. I'm buying myself a copy of this book for my birthday. I don't even care.

Also, I'm pretty much done the cover art. I might rewrite the synopsis, and I'm hoping to find an impartial reviewer, so I can have a quote on the back from someone who's not among my fictionpress readers, just to lend a little more credibility to the thing. Anyway, I'm fairly psyched.

What else. I nearly punched my brother in the head last night because he called me the C word. I showed remarkable restraint, and am kind of wishing I hadn't.

Now, as promised, some reviewiness.
I read Jingo after The Fifth Elephant because I liked the synopsis for Elephant better, but since they're both Terry Pratchett books, they were both amazing, and I probably should have read them in order, just because.

Anyway, Jingo was, as is to be expected, pretty amazing. It had a lot of Vimes, a lot of Carrot and a lot of Vetinary, and you can't go wrong with the three of them. It's a blatant attack of racisim and its causes, as well as media spin and almost everything that's wrong with the modern world, while at the same time, managing to make it acceptable to notice and discuss the differences of various cultures.

Seriously, if you don't read Pratchett, start now. Start yesterday. He's managed to surpass Heinlein as my favourite author, and Good Omens, his colaberation with Neil Gaiman, has almost usurped the throne of my number one favourite (still, barely, Pride and Prejudice). He's beyond amazing.

I've mentioned before that I'm a bigger fan of Pratchett's newer stuff, and Equal Rites is only his third novel. Nevertheless, I quite enjoyed it. It was printed in 1987 and has a lot to do with women's rights and other social issues but, as is always the case with Pratchett, the issues are adressed sideways, so you're paying attention to the story, not the message behind it.

The story follows Esk, a young girl, on her journey to become the first female wizard. Wizards in Pratchett's universe are not only chauvanists, but misogynists as well... and everybody, it seems, is of the opinion that there is men's work and women's work, except, of course, Esk, who is too young to understand why this would be the case, and spends a large portion of the book asking really inconvenient questions like, "Why?"

Another good one, anyway. I'm not as huge a fan of Granny Weatherwax and the Ramtops as I am of Vimes and Anhk Morpork, but there you go. Can't have everything, and this was a nice diversion from the big city.

And now... I'm out of Pratchett!!!!! :( Most of the stuff in the house was my sister's and is now packed away in storage or at her boyfriend's house; everything that is still in the house, I've read. I suppose I could reread it, but I want something new. I don't know what I'm going to do when I run out of Pratchett for real... I think I'll just die.

Well, this has been fun, but I suppose I should get back to editing now. I have to clean the kitchen tonight, work out, edit some more and pack up for tomorrow, for I'm off to spend the week with my friend Sarah, which should be super fun.

General Smith Allen

You know what? I think from now on it's safe to assume I don't have a job, because when I do have a job, I'll likely have a huge post about how amazing it is to be employed (and how I'm okay with turning 35).

In the meantime.

I'm starting to freak out about Aigaion Girl. I just realized that I have a month and a half to finish editing it if I want it to be ready for the fall, and I really, really want it to be ready for the fall. Like, a lot. So much so that I actually misused 'like' in writing and am not going back to fix it. A. Lot. As well as editing it, I have to format it, design a cover for it and convert it into PDF. Okay, so the last part will take two seconds, but the formatting is likely to take approximately forever, and I'm scared that I'll screw it up somehow. For right now, the big thing is editing. I'm almost done editing one of my main characters. I have two and a half more main, three secondary and one background character to edit (it's written from the individual perspectives of a bunch of people), which I really want to get done by the end of this month, because then the actual story-edits start. Yeah, I'm freaking out just a tiny bit.

Also, I've noticed that when I'm... oh, how to put this delicately... when I'm being visited by my least-favourite aunt, I find that I'm more forgiving of asshole men who do not, under any circumstances, deserve anything from me, much less my forgiveness. I get all soft and feminine, and I think things that are absolutely ridiculous, like that said men might have a snowball's chance in Hell of ever winning back my affection. Obviously, this is beyond insane, and I put it down to hormones, because really. I mean, come on.

My back is killing me. I hate this desk.

I have no idea who General Smith Allen is, if indeed he is anybody. I typed in the word general, and the Smith Allen just flowed along after it. Whatever. I do the same thing when I draw. Every couple of pages in all of my sketch books is a drawing surrounded by weird little things I don't remember writing. An alarming number of them say things like: I hate my life and kill me, but a lot of them just say things that are completely and totally messed up and make absolutely no sense. A couple of them are scrawled sideways as if I had my eyes closed at the time, and warn about the perrils of trying to write in your sleep.

Anywho.

I miss people. I miss Claytron and I miss Morgan and I miss Dr. Allard who taught my Romanticism class, and Mr. Root, who taught Writer's Craft.

I think I should go. This is starting to read like I'm drunk and I'm not. Next up, reviews of whatever Terry Pratchett books I've read since my last review. Jingo and Equal Rites and probably one other one, but I can't recall for sure.