Calendar Woes

I must really be getting in shape from my ballet exercise class because I'm not the least bit stiff or sore today. Now I want someone to develop an exercise class based on River's ballet-fu from Serenity -- some kind of ballet/kickboxing hybrid. That would rock.

I got everything on my to-do list done yesterday. Unfortunately, one of my tasks was getting my timeline and calendar of the year's activities in shape, and that slapped me in the face with the ugly realization that two of my most anticipated events for the year are happening the same weekend in different parts of the country. On the bright side, if you can call it that, I don't have to make the agonizing decision of which one to attend, since I committed to one of them back in November before I even knew when/if/where the other one would be. Now I'm really, really bummed, and I can't think of a way to do both without inventing teleportation or time travel (Hmm, I wonder if you could build a working transporter out of parts from a couple of old printers, an old computer and an ancient crock pot). I suppose if I could work it out with both groups I could do part of each event and then hope for no flight delays.

I have a new book coming to life in my head, and it's starting to drive me nuts because it's not one I'm contracted for and I can't even try to sell it until I complete and turn in book 4 of my series. Actually, it's an older book, one I've been tinkering with off and on for about ten years. I've always had a sense of the theme I was trying to explore, but the way I went about doing it wasn't working. This book was a large reason behind my long publishing dry spell because I kept working on it and re-working it and it still didn't sell. My current agent was able to immediately pinpoint what the problem was, but I didn't really agree with her on the way to fix it. The other night the whole thing of how to fix it -- who the characters really were and what was really going on with them -- came to me in a flash. It would be a complete re-write, just salvaging some of the scene ideas, but I think in a way it's closer to the story that was initially in my head way back then than any of my previous efforts were. I'll let the brain go on percolating it until I have time to deal with it.

I'm in the process of wading through my e-mail in box. I started with more than 3,000 messages. Now I have it down to under 1,500. Not all of them were things I let pile up while I was lost in Book World. Some went back a few years. I'm bad about getting a message, thinking that I want to respond but not wanting to deal with it at the moment, and letting it sit in my in box as a reminder. And then more things pile up, so I never end up dealing with it. Or I keep things that I need to have handy as reference, but then forget to delete them after I no longer need them. I also seem to keep every message my editor or agent ever sends me, plus I still have all of the congratulations e-mails I got when I sold Enchanted, Inc. I'm trying to move all those souvenir e-mails into folders to get them out of my in box so the real to-do messages don't get so lost. One problem I've discovered from having so many messages in my in box is that if people's computer clocks aren't set right, I may miss their messages entirely. They end up a year or so back in the stack. I found a brand-new message, never opened, back in the July section of the in box. I doubt it actually came in July. It probably was just another bad computer clock setting. My goal is to get everything that's not a current to-do or reminder out of my in box.

I had thought about going to the movies this afternoon. A movie I'd put off seeing is now at the dollar theater, probably for the last week, since it comes out on DVD this week. It's a DVD I'll probably buy, anyway, so at the moment my brain is trying to talk me out of going, even if it is 50 cent day at the dollar theater. Even the thought of shoe shopping along the way isn't tempting me much at the moment. I'm trying to figure out if that's me being practical because I do have a lot to get done, or if it's the hibernation instinct kicking in again.