The Rest is Over

I had a nicely restful weekend, which is good because I have to hit the ground running this week. I need to get the book totally revised and edited by August 1 in order to fit my copyeditor's schedule (since she happens to have a slot open, and you pretty much have to pry my copyeditor out of my cold, dead hands because we've been through too many books together). And I have a few more blog posts and interviews to deal with, along with some other PR and business stuff. I was about to say that I'm going to be very busy until August, but then I remembered WorldCon and all my FenCon stuff really kicking in, and then there's the children's music and art camp at church, and I'm going to be busy until late September. Then I hope to do some travel in October.

A lot of Saturday and then Sunday morning was spent working on music because I had my first ever real solo in church -- not a duet, not an ensemble, just me at the microphone. I think it went pretty well, maybe not as perfect as I would have liked because I'm a raging perfectionist, I was a bit nervous, and the person who was talking just before I got up to sing said something that made me a bit teary-eyed and that perfectly fit the song I was singing, but I got compliments, and the pianist said she thought the congregation was very moved by it.

Otherwise, there was TV watching and reading. I've been watching the BBC America version of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and I think they're doing a great job of adapting the book. It's been a few years since I last read it, so I'm not doing a really close comparison, but nothing has yet struck me as clashing horribly with my mental images from the book. I may want to re-read after the series is over.

Then on PBS on Sunday night, there's Poldark, which is full of all kinds of lovely scenery and costumes and a ridiculously good-looking man who frequently removes his shirt for all kinds of manly physical labor, and I think there's a plot in there somewhere, but I get distracted by the manly shoulders. Actually, it's about a British soldier returning home after the American Revolution to find that everyone assumed he was dead, his father has died, his home and estate are crumbling, he's broke, and the woman he loves is engaged to someone else. This is where I really don't understand the British class system because this guy is dead broke, living in a ruin, and having to do a lot of the labor himself because he can't afford to pay employees, and yet he's considered "better" than people who actually aren't much worse off than he is and even some who are doing better than he is, just because he's a "gentleman." He doesn't even have a title, it seems. I've never figured out the distinction between "gentleman" and "ordinary guy" when no titles are involved and the gentleman is dirt poor. But still, shoulder and back muscles!

That's followed by The Crimson Field, which is basically about a WWI field hospital and the nurses who work there. Very soapy, but very well done, though I do get distracted by thinking "Wait, which episode of Doctor Who was he/she in?" with all the actors. They're all so familiar, but very much out of context.