Thursday, 07 June 2001

I'm really pleased with the writing I got done yesterday. I was less productive today. I only got one thing done, and it wasn't really new writing, but I figured out a detail that I needed to plant and went back and stuck in the bits of it three different places.

I got in a run today, just my second run since I got here. Because things have been so compressed it seems like I'm really slacking off on my running, but actually I guess it has just been four days, so two runs is not so far off my target. It was a non-pathetic run, too, so I feel good.

Steven Barnes did a reading and book signing at the Archive Bookstore. The reading was great. He read from his forthcoming book Lion's Blood, an alternate history in which Islamic Africa colonized the new world with European slaves. It sounds like it's going to be both a great adventure story and very funny. Also great is the famous Archive Bookstore cat whose name I have forgotten.

I had hoped to turn my story in tomorrow, but I decided not to. If I had skipped dinner out and the reading I think I could have gotten down rest of the story, but it wouldn't have been ready for a critique.

My own theory of "when to get something critiqued" is that I have to fix pretty much all the problems that I know how to fix. Otherwise the critiques don't do much good--people tell me stuff you already know. But I can't wait until the piece is the absolute best I can make it, because then I tend to think of it as "finished" and a critique isn't helpful.

I think I'll be able to finish the prose on Friday and Saturday, do one major revision pass on Sunday, and then turn it in on Monday. We'll see.

I enjoyed playing Mafia last night, even though I was the very first person killed in the first game. It was Karina who got me killed. She didn't even try to make the case that I was Mafia, she just looked up and said, "Let's kill Phil!"

New manuscripts are starting to get turned in on a regular basis. We got seven today. We're only reading four for tomorrow, thank goodness.