Christmas Eve

Soon to be Christmas morning. The little one is tucked in, the house is clean-ish, the food is ready for tomorrow. Not bad considering what a hectic, horrible month it has been.

Work, illness and stress are a mean combination. But tonight is the first night of my vacation, and I am already feeling better.

The Glenlivit 12 year old helped immensely.

So Merry Christmas everyone. May you have a good holiday season and a good rest, and if I don't blog again before that, a Happy New Year as well.

A Little Christmas Music

I think I have a new favourite Christmas song.

The singer is Tim Minchin, an Australian musician, actor, comedian and writer. And apparently, if you download the song from iTunes in December, half of the proceeds go to autism research.

Tip of the hat to Neil Gaiman, who posted this on his journal first.

And now, since it's 10:30 p.m., it's time for more editing.

Editing and Brain Rules

Charging madly forward. Reached page 267 tonight, removed another 1500 words or so, and am almost pleased with the progress.

So is Gabrielle, who has been giving me gems from the Dragon Moon Press December slushpile. Impressive stuff. Not in a good way.

At work we are putting together some videos and part of my research on it took me to the Brain Rules website. It's a fascinating website, built around the book by the same title, written by John Medina. I haven't had time to dig too deeply into it, but it looks like the man has done his research, and the website itself is a great example of marketing design. There's a lot of neat stuff that I intend to explore sometime when it isn't midnight.

Correction. After midnight. I'm going to get myself four hours sleep and see if I can manage a workout in the morning (or should I say, later this morning?). It's unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

The Last Edit - Night 1

Did 46 pages tonight. Not bad for a start back, but much more to do.

Here's the thing: My editor needs it back by Christmas so we can get copy set and ready to go for the first round or reviews. The book is still 10,000 words more than what it should be, and while Gabrielle and I have worked out what needs to be done, it still needs to be done before the end of the month.

No problem.

Really.

Tomorrow, the goal is 80 pages. Let's see how it goes.

Taking a Night Off!!!

Why, you ask?

Because last night my editor, the indomitable Gabrielle Harbowy, and I finished going through her notes for Cold Magics. They were good notes and we resolved them all, or marked where I have to fix things during my next task:

One more edit before Dec. 25.

That's right, I have to go through the entire book by Christmas if we want to get advanced copies to the reviewers. And I still need to take out 10,000 more words. Oy veh!

But tonight, I am taking a break. I am chilling out, relaxing, and generally doing nothing except getting to bed on time. My only regret is I don't have a nice bottle of red wine to do it with.

So have a good night. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow (and every day for the next 14) we edit!