Two Weeks

It looks like I should avoid reading inflammatory articles on subjects that already irk me on the day I'm doing my taxes because it gets me all riled up. Yes, all those stories about guys I've dated were true, and I wasn't even exaggerating. I've joked about having "I haven't met anyone I wanted to marry who wanted to marry me" printed up on cards to make it easier to answer the inevitable question, and maybe I should add the URL to yesterday's post. Between those oddballs and all the Incredible Disappearing Men, it's pretty easy to see how I've managed to remain single.

We're at the two-week countdown on Don't Hex With Texas. More reviews are starting to come in, and they're positive, which is nice. You'd think by now I'd have more confidence, but this is always a really tense time for me, knowing it's out there, I can't do anything to change it, and waiting to see how it's received. I'm no longer quite as anxious with anticipation as I was with the earlier books, but that could be in part due to the fact that I've been busy and distracted with a lot of other things, so it's just now starting to hit me that, yikes!, the next book comes out in two weeks. I haven't done nearly the same level of pre-publication publicity that I have with other books. Now, watch this one sell best of all. It's still ranked pretty high at Amazon for pre-orders. I don't know yet what bookstore orders were like, if that other chain that begins with B is continuing to barely stock the books or if you might actually find it there.

After doing my taxes, I've made my annual pledge to be more organized in the future. I was a little better last year than I was previously, and that helped, so maybe I can improve bit by bit. Now I need to clean my house before my parents come over later in the week, and then I want to start a gradual decluttering/overhaul of my whole house, taking everything out, sorting through it, tossing/donating things I don't use and then putting the things I'm keeping back in an organized fashion. In June, I will have lived here ten years, so I think it's high time. As an army brat, I'm used to just doing that sort of thing every time I move, but without moving, things tend to pile up. I've broken it down into lots of little areas and made a checklist, so maybe I won't fizzle out midway through, as I so often do with projects like that. I've also made a list of some remodeling and repair work I want to do whenever I have money, but before I can do that, I need to have the house in order.

And it's occurred to me that I have an essay due in a couple of weeks that I've got partially written in my head, but I need to do some research for it. Then a week from Friday I've got to head to Austin for the Nebula Awards weekend. And then the book comes out. Meanwhile, I'm still waiting to hear back from my agent about that book I finished. I'll likely have more revisions to do before it goes out on the market, and I'm working on developing something else to get out there, since at the moment I'm essentially unemployed without a contract. The next three or four weeks may be a little psycho as I try to take care of all that while doing the things that come up around the release of a book.

So, that was all pretty random. But at least I wasn't ranting.