Quite a week. In addition to the combined computer and (observed) car trouble of Wednesday, there were more DDJ phone Shenanigans and two other car sagas as well as a writing rejection and a complete SoZ plot rethink.
Regarding the DDJ, the less that is said of that, the better. One day I'll be able to, you know, call the folks I need to call, but that might be a present from Santa, at the rate this is going.
As for the car issues, ooh boy. Last Saturday, my mother and I both spaced on something very vital: confirming we actually had enough gas in the tank to get from Casa Grande to Mesa and Scottsdale and back. We almost made it. We were less than ten miles from our exit off of I-10 when the truck ran out of fumes. I don't have many blonde moments, but the ones I do have are stunning. It's no fun being stranded on the side of a 75mph road, heavy with trucks making their way to Tucson before nightfall. But we got gassed up and back on route without any trouble and within an hour. It was just a "don't we feel stupid" moment for Mom and me.
Today's car bliss wrecked my day. I was on my way back up to Scottsdale (last week I dropped off my wedding ring to get re-sized for free at the only location for the jeweler's franchise in the area, today I picked it up), using cruise control to keep my knee from getting twitchy, when suddenly I noticed the brakes were very tight, I couldn't accelerate for shit (pedal to the metal, and I couldn't kick it up past 70 mph), and there was smoke that smelled godawful coming off the car. After the car-be-cue from Wednesday, I was, in a word, freaked out. Luckily, this happened within a couple of miles of the place where Mark had gotten the brakes fixed last night on his way home from work. So I swung in there expecting them to get the car up in the air and say, "Oops, our bad, we forgot to do X." Nope, no such luck. An hour and a half later, they couldn't find a problem, nor could they replicate it. They did say it could be a problem with the cruise control function, so I sucked it up and suffered a sore knee for the rest of the driving.
On the writing front, my short story "Timing" was rejected from Fantasy & Science Fiction this week. The note was personalized with my address, name, and title and hand-signed. Don't know if F&SF does that for all of their rejections, but I'm not going to spend any further time trying to read between the lines. This week I'll be looking into a couple of markets, probably with electronic submission capabilities and may even have another rejection by next week's check-in.
My plot and character revisions for Velorin and SoZ will be discussed in more detail on Thursday, which is the day dedicated to my own writing projects.
Still no word on whether or not my writing computer is toast, but I find that I don't care too much since I've got all my data on a hard drive that I can plug into any computer I can grab, and there are four set up and two others in boxes at the moment. I'll survive.
Seeing as how I jet back to Colorado on Thursday, I'm not going to even think about hoping for a less crazy week next week. We'll just see what insanity awaits.
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2 comments:
Yes, that's their form letter. There are, I think, four version of the form letter, and people venture translations for each one, depending on the language used. I think it's been discussed on Forward Motion before (as well as a couple of LiveJournal writing communities), if you want to look up what yours means.
I did a little bit of hunting (no more than 15 minutes) and couldn't find anything in the obvious places with the obvious search strings. That's my limit on this kind of navel-gazing. Onward! :)
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