Got a call today from my agent’s office, that the cover copy person is working on cover copy (the enticing description of what’s inside) for the short fiction collection. The cover design itself is “somewhere” having “something” done (I don’t know where or what yet, so the quote marks are just a hint at that.) However, this is progress. Things are moving. No schedule yet and probably won’t be until the cover’s done and approved.
\n<\/p>\n
I am looking at the stories for the second collection, which will need more filling out, right now, since I took a dislike to one I’d done earlier this year, around the time my father died. I think it has some of the same problems as Divided Allegiance<\/em>, written too soon after my mother died. I may rewrite it completely, without looking at the current version. And I’m thinking of tackling the legend of Camwyn Dragonmaster\/Dragonfriend in a…different…way. <\/p>\n And I’m working more slowly on the new (non-Paks) book than I could wish, as the time with the spam attack really interfered and broke the flow. However I had a good chat about it with a friend yesterday, and have some new ideas. Cracolnya’s story can’t decide what to be, yet. It’s one of those that promises to be one length and then makes a bid for more, and then doesn’t deliver enough substance for the new length it demanded. I may cut it back to the shorter form and be done with it. Or not. It’s another that I did the most work on earlier in the summer, where it was mixed in with my father’s death and the eye surgery.<\/p>\n The spam overload here is, at least temporarily, in abeyance. I completely deleted (to an offline file) the comment that the bot was keying on, the one that was hammered with many thousands of messages a day, and Steve-the-genius at the hosting company changed the “auto-delete” delay for Akismet to one day instead of 15, which meant that a vast backlog went *poof* without my having to hand-delete it one 20-message page at a time. (By vast, I mean many thousands of 20-message pages, way over 100,000 messages, which I had whittled down about 40K of.) I still have an oversized amount of comments here, which I’ve taken a few days off from removing, in order to get some actual writing work (and other work) done, but I’ll get back to that. There’ve been some minor emergencies requiring extra trips out of town–nothing dire, just time-consuming.<\/p>\n The visual thing is worst when reading (affecting both on-screen and on-paper reading…if I get my head in exactly the right position relative to the page, and in the right light, it’s almost normal, but if not…it can be double vision, or something a little stranger. I’m told by my eye doctor, with whom I had the last post-surgery visit on Thursday, that the difference in visual acuity alone between the two eyes is part of the problem. (About three and a half diopters) He says even when the nearsighted eye is corrected, the distance between the lens that’s doing the convergence and the retina is so differnet (one in front of the eye, one in the eye) that it’s causing distortions my brain has to learn to put back into one seamless image. He says I’m doing very well, actually. But it does limit my working time at the computer; I can feel the eyestrain in the little muscles. It will get better, he says, but it may take several more months. The other problem, which I refer to as the missing pixels, is just there, and I’ll have to work around it. He thinks just ignoring it is the best approach. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, the same day I had the appointment, my bike turned up with a very flat tire, so I took it down to the city to the bike shop when I’d finished with the eye doctor. It was overdue for a tuneup anyway. It would be ideal to learn to be my own bike mechanic…if I had the time to do that. But as long as I have other errands in the city (which I did) taking the bike in and letting them work on it while I work on something else is a better use of my time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Got a call today from my agent’s office, that the cover copy person is working on cover copy (the enticing description of what’s inside) for the short fiction collection. The cover design itself is “somewhere” having “something” done (I don’t know where or what yet, so the quote marks are just a hint at that.) 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