Wasted Week

This week has been pretty much a wash as far as work is concerned, and I was feeling kind of guilty until I realized that the past two weeks were very intense with conferences and conventions and travel, not to mention some very important reading, so it makes sense that I might be struggling a wee bit to get my head back in the game. Today, though, I think I'll work. Really.

Not that it's been a wasted week. I spoke to a writing group on Monday night and I think my Harry Potter chatter hasn't been entirely wasted as I got a shout-out in the newspaper chat session from the writer who interviewed me (in the context of what to read next) and I think my obsessive discussion in related communities has drawn at least a few people to my blog and maybe that will get them interested in my books (the great thing about what I do is that most of my usual time-wasting activities can be classified as "marketing" and therefore count as work -- I'm not goofing off when I'm posting to message boards. I'm doing stealth marketing). I'm doing an online Q&A session this weekend and I finally set myself up at Amazon to have all my books -- including the anthologies -- put on my profile and posted a little blog post there. For those of you nagging me to do an article on the archetypes topic, The Writer magazine has just invited me to contribute it. Not bad for a week's work. I just haven't worked on an actual book.

Strangely, I seem to have become really popular at MySpace all of a sudden. I went from averaging 2-3 friend requests a day to getting about ten a day. I'm not sure what that really means, where it's coming from or how it helps, but it is interesting.

My big achievement of the day was mastering the self-checkout at Kroger -- including produce. I've always been a little afraid of trying to do the self-checkout when I have things without scannable bar codes, which means I don't get much produce there, especially when I'm running in to grab a few things. You'd think the human checkers would be glad to have people go through their lines because it means they have jobs, but the ones at that store tend to act like you're seriously inconveniencing them by not using the self-checkout machines. But today I managed to ring up even the produce for myself. At the other neighborhood store, I like the checkers and have no problem going through their lines, but at this particular store, there are days when I don't want the human interaction, especially not with a surly teenager, and being able to get in and out of the grocery store without talking to anyone can be nice.

Now I'm looking forward to a weekend at home with nothing to do. There's Doctor Who tonight, and then I think Saturday night will be movie night.

Meanwhile, I need to think about what I want for my birthday. My parents have been asking me, and I haven't had time to think about it. I'm at a point in my life where my wants/needs are all either really minor and trivial or huge and quite specific (the kinds of things you want to choose for yourself). And the minor, trivial fun things I could ask for are things that aren't readily available or easy to find where my parents are.