Summer Doldrums

I have two books off with my agent, so now it's time to really get going on the next one. It's a complete manuscript, as in there's an end, but there's something not quite right about it that needs fixing before it's ready to go. I think I know what's not right, but I'm still figuring out how to fix it. I like this book, though, so I don't mind wallowing in it to explore possibilities.

It didn't work out for me to get on Worldcon programming, which is my fault for dithering so long. I'm sure my ego will get a few stings from not being special and important, but on the other hand, it will be nice to go to a convention and have zero obligations. I often joke about the Law of Convention Programming, which states that the events you most want to attend will be scheduled directly opposite the events you're obligated to attend. This way, I can do what I want, when I want to. I'll probably help out some in the SFWA suite, which will allow for good networking, and I know enough people that I can probably end up hanging out with the cool kids. I can spend the days learning and the evenings networking.

Reno is currently cooler than Dallas, but I'm still wishing that the convention could be somewhere even cooler because summer is really getting to me. I was reading a book earlier this week that involved the Year Without a Summer from the 1800s, when things were extremely unseasonably cool in Europe and northeastern America (in large part due to a volcanic eruption), and I found myself sighing wistfully at the thought. I know it was actually quite a calamity because of the crop failures, but it was also a big period creatively because of the authors trapped indoors by the bad weather, not to mention the spectacular sunsets that inspired a lot of paintings. I could go for a cool, rainy spell. It probably doesn't help that I've had a bit of a bug all week, so I've been running a low-grade fever. It's just enough to make hot weather even more miserable while making the air conditioning give me chills. On the bright side, I've been doing a lot of reading, which is what I needed to do right now, anyway.

Maybe this would be a good time to try those rainy day classical music CDs. I just need to find a way to black out the living room windows, which I probably need to do anyway because the drawback of the LCD TV is that it gets murky in dark scenes when the room is bright. That's made my Harry Potter rewatch difficult because so much of those movies takes place in the dark and my living room is very, very bright, with three walls of windows.

And I have about two and a half months of this kind of weather to go. If I ever get super-wealthy, I may become one of those people who summers in the mountains.