Cold!

Another Saturday arrives! This one comes to you from a slightly chilly apartment, as our heater ist kaput. It's a contraption in the shared wall of the living room and the bedroom in which the intake vent would push out warm air into two lower vents. Unfortunately, the motor in the intake vent is most likely older than I am and started rattling quite loudly over the last few days. Building maintenance will of course fix this for us, but unfortunately it will be a few weeks as they order a replacement heater for us. They've given us a space heater for the front room, but thankfully Spare Oom's floor heater is working just fine. If we need a quick sauna heat-up we can just go in there for a bit. :)

It of course reminds me of Thanksgiving 1995, when I lived in Allston--one of the coldest weekends in the Boston area, when the apartment manager left and spent the night at relatives. That was significantly worse, as I had to complain quite loudly to my landlord (who relented and gave me a space heater, natch), and I actually put up a bedsheet over my bedroom window to keep out the quite strong draft. No lie--that sheet billowed like a sail all winter. Thankfully, though, our present situation is INFINITELY better, our landlord is a very cool guy, and the maintenance guy's cousin/assistant lives next door if there's any other issues. So there's that. ;)

I'm Only Making Plans for Nigel

Lots of writing-related stuff going on here in JoncWorld!

--My primary work these last few weeks, when not working on The Persistence of Memories revision, has been getting the submission package ready for Angry Robot's Open Door. The last few days have been spent working on a two-page synopsis. I probably could have approached this one a little better by creating one from scratch; instead, however, I took a previously created eleven-page outline and edited the hell out of it until it made the two page limit. [ dancinghorse, you may remember this outline from a previous read. I've since learned my lesson in brevity. :) ] The lesson learned here is to shape the synopsis down to the barest of detail. The second lesson is to work from the ground up, not from the roof down...it's probably a hell of a lot easier!

--Despite a few coding bumps in the road, I am now building what I'm calling my official author website. It's focused primarily on the trilogy and its universe (which I have now dubbed the Mendaihu Universe) and can be found here if you're curious. I'm currently having a few coding issues (on the WordPress side), but hopefully those should be ironed out soon.

--I'm attempting to do my daily 750 Words again, after not doing so for some time. I often do them during work hours, and Q4 has finally quieted down enough that I can squeeze it in over the course of the day. I'm hoping this will clean out the cobwebs and get some new creativity up and running again.

--It's December, and many music magazines have already posted their best-of-year posts, so I should probably start doing mine as well. Maybe start building the year-end compilation too.

--This also means that it's time for me to do a retrospective on what I've worked on writingwise this year, and my plans for next year as well. Let's just say future plans for 2014 are going to be quite productive, and hopefully fun and fruitful as well!