I’m at sixes and sevens, waiting for Donna to read the manuscript and give me her notes. I sort of want to work on something else, but I also want to clean my office, but I also want to read about a dozen books, and I can’t settle on any one thing, so I end up doing a great deal of very little. I should be used to this, but I’m not.
Once this book goes out the door it will be the first time in about four years that I will not be working on a novel. (Yes, I do still have two novels “in process” and I can go back to work on either one of them, and I will, but I don’t have to.) It’s been that long since I’ve actually had down time.
I’ve been futzing with electronics. A couple weeks back I bought Donna a new computer. She wanted a flatscreen, but her old computer was quite old and I wasn’t altogether sure a new screen would connect to it. But she also wanted a CD burner, which we lost when I got my new computer. After pricing what I thought she wanted and the software to run it and this and that, it was only slightly more expensive to just replace her whole system.
And she’s been using it. Especially after I then went out and bought a router and got her connected to the IntraWeebs. Which was a chore. “Oh, you won’t have any problems with this,” the helpful techie at Best Buy said, “it’s plug-and-play.” Three and a half hours on the phone with my ISP and it works. And works well.
I then made the mistake of buying another piece of electronics online. I know better. We have never bought anything electronic mail order that worked right. Never. But Donna’s car stereo can handle an MP3 component and with her new computer we can do that, so I ordered one. The damn thing didn’t work right at first and then ended up not working at all. This morning I packed it all up and sent it back. We’ll got to a store, with a People, and buy it there, so we get explanations that haven’t been translated twice from some language barely within the IndoEuropean group.
I now have to do some serious thinking about the future. I have a couple months of unemployment left and still no book deal. This is becoming seriously annoying. I have had some nerve-wracking news, but no sale. With this novel, there will now be four of these things knocking on doors, bringing its sad bowl up to the front, plaintively saying “Please, sir, may I have a contract.” So I have to start thinking about a new day job.
I really don’t want to go there. I’ll think about that next week.
This morning I booted up an old short story that’s been lying in my hard drive, incomplete and forlorn. I don’t know why I can’t get a handle on these anymore, they just don’t go where I want them to. Granted, what I always wanted to be was a novelist, but even so…
It is Friday. We have a weekend ahead of us. Next week…
Ah, next, March 6th—-this is rather stunning to contemplate—is our anniversary. One of them. Our First Date. March 6th, 1980.
Yes, folks, Donna and I have been “going together” for…*gulp*…three decades!
Breathtaking. Yes, it is. Thirty years. If you’re impressed, think how we feel. Three decades. And you know what?
I still like her.