It’s been two months since I broached this subject. Now it’s time to make a choice. I’ll be evaluating my options over the weekend.
If you have an opinion and you haven’t emailed me, now’s the time.
I’ll be e-mailing everybody about this over the course of the day, but I just wanted to put a note here, since a lot of people seem to read the weblog.
Just so you know — there is a postal dispute going on in Northern Ireland that is affecting shipments of stuff from my eBay store to the States. I didn’t know about this before, but investigation of some delayed shipments over the last week has turned up the information that apparently registered mail to the US and some other destinations does not always fly directly from Dublin Airport. Sometimes it goes via ground transport to Belfast’s sorting office, and from there to one of Belfast’s two airports. Unfortunately, this work dispute has been going on for the last two weeks, maybe more — and as a result, a lot of my registered mail is sitting up there in a big hopper with about 8 million other pieces of mail, and not going anywhere.
So if you have not seen something you ordered a couple of weeks back, please be patient — it’s probably sitting in Belfast. I’ll post some more information about this as soon as I get it.
So I’m minding my own business Thursday morning when the phone rings. On the other end is a nice lady from a production company connected with RTÉ, the Irish national broadcaster. Somehow or other, she’s gotten hold of my name, and she wants to know if I’m interested in appearing on a TV show called “The Big Bite”. This is an afternoon current affairs and discussion program featuring a journalist-presenter and usually four guests who sit around discussing some interesting topic, normally — but not always — something that won’t get too rancorous in mid-afternoon, just before the cooking and casual chat show that follows.
It turns out that Monday’s topic is whether or not there’s likely to be life on other worlds, and they thought it would be fun to have me on the show. The other guests are a professor of astrophysics from University College Dublin, Dave Moore from Astronomy Ireland, and someone else whose name I forget at the moment. Either way, it sounds like the opinions of the group are going to be heavily weighted towards the “yes” side.
So that’ll be enjoyable. Meanwhile, I go into the usual pre-appearance craziness. What time will the car from the studio get here? (Always too late.) Will the driver get lost? (Yes, even though I e-mailed them an extremely clear and straightforward map.) I need a haircut. (Thank heaven the hairdresser has time to take me today.) I have nothing to wear. (Well, yes, I do. For something like this, jeans and a silk sweater and an Hèrmés scarf — no, make that the shawl with the sun, moon, and stars on it — will do just fine.) And so on, and so on…
Oh, well. Everything will sort itself out. And it’ll be fun to get up to RTÉ again; I haven’t been up there for a couple of years.
Tags: Radio TelefÃs Éireann, RTÉ, the big bite, TV, television, appearance, Diane Duane, science fiction
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The wedding party lines up after the dust has settled at Boskone 1987. Left to right: groomsmen Kurt Siegel and George (“Dupa T. Parrot”) Brickner, maid of honour Ramona Sepulveda, matron of honor Beth Meacham: the bride: the groom: best man Todd McCaffrey: maid of honour Theresa Renner: bride-chucker-out David Gerrold: maid of honour Wilma Fisher.
What a day….
As of today, it’s been nineteen years since I married this man…only partly realizing the incredible deal I was getting: life-partnership with a talented and twisty-brained writer, a careful and methodical modeler, a clever and knowledgeable swordsman, a rampaging sex god (are the two connected, I wonder?…), a gifted etymologist, a creative and reliable chef, an unerring continuity guy, a film enthusiast and screenwriter with a 70mm screen buried in his brain…a man equally gifted at understanding train timetables, impressing Paris cabbies with his French accent, and sticking pills down reluctant cats.
And I am, pardon me for saying it, the luckiest woman on Earth.
Happy anniversary, sweetie.
I had a query about the subject late last night, so I thought I’d cross-blog the response here. (…”Cross-blog”. Is that a word? Well, it is now.)
As regards The Big Meow: I don’t have enough information yet to make a decision about writing the book, as I haven’t yet hit the “break-even” point in terms of responses to my initial posting about the project. So far I’ve only heard from a few hundred people, and even if every one of them bought a book at the stated price, I’d still be losing money on the deal. As the project stands at present, I would need to hear positively from at least a couple/few hundred more people before I could commit.
— And so that no one reading this misunderstands me: for costing purposes on this project — without getting into actual figures — I’m “paying myself” the lowest amount my agent would have allowed me to take for a work-for-hire/licensed-property book between three and five years ago, when I was still doing such things. This amount — again, without getting into actual figures — would be about one-fifth to one-sixth of what I normally get for a writing a novel these days. To do this very on-spec piece of work, I would be taking a considerable drop in pay while I spent a significant portion of my work year on the project — so you can see where my concern lies, as I have cats to feed, and they don’t understand explanations about wanting to write just for the joy of it: they want to know where their dinners are.
(An additional and slightly related issue: one of the ways I’ve been testing the water as regards self-publishing is with online sale of a book already written but never published elsewhere, though it was bought by mainline publishers twice — details here at the website for Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South. The sales so far of the book’s e-version have been only modest…and this for a novel already written. Looking at this situation, I have to ask myself whether The Big Meow is really likely to do any better, and whether I may be about to start wasting a lot of precious time on something that’s just “a nice idea”.)
…So if you know somebody who’s interested in seeing this book written, or (looking over the heads of whose who’ve already mailed me) if you’re yourself interested, now’s the time to drop me a note and let me know. The original post laying out the situation with this book is here. The blurb for the prospective novel (and the project’s homepage) are here. The address to mail support or inquiries to is
thebigmeow@youngwizards.com
If you haven’t done so already, please let me know what you think.
Or you could, if you liked, convince me more concretely by putting money-where-mouth-is and buying a copy of A Wind from the South. (There are sample chapters and links to reader comments at its website.)
But I also want to thank very much all those who’ve already written — so many of your comments have been really heartwarming — and those who’ve read AWFTS and have been having fun with it. You guys make the work worthwhile. 🙂
Without the right license. (snicker)
I do, however, feel sorry for the poor victim, who’s probably still having shot tweezered out of him.
(In the background, Peter mutters: “They’re making a lot of fuss over someone who can’t even spell. …Oh, not Quayle?”)
There’s been significant improvement since that last post.
Goodman, for his part, is almost completely recovered from his enteritis, and is wandering around the house shouting for food in the traditional manner. The racket is surprising after a few days of relative quiet.
Meanwhile, Squeak was taken off to the vet on Saturday, and was remarkably well behaved for a cat who was plainly in a lot of pain. They knocked him out and drained the abscess, which apparently had enough fibrotic tissue at the bottom of it to suggest that it had been there for possibly as long as a couple of weeks before it started to get acute. Squeaky now looks extremely peculiar, with a big shaved patch on his side, and all painted up with colloidal silver: but he’s a lot happier with life.
The vet looked at us rather strangely when we immediately removed the celluloid collar that they’d put on him to keep him from pulling the stitches out. But, as I’d thought, Squeak is paying them no attention whatever — he’s much too busy catching up on his sleeping and eating. He quickly got back into his normal operating mode — only spending a little more time than usual, immediately post-op, growling at the other cats and whacking them if they got too close to him — and is now alternating long periods of relaxation with the usual evening beating-of-the-bounds, carefully re-spraying the boundaries of his territory.
What a cat.
So things are getting back to normal, and I can now return to (a) finishing this YW short story and (b) whacking our producers’ website into shape with some needed changes before the tradeshow season begins.
(BTW, the short story has been producing some strange fallout. Suddenly we seem to have a chocolate-oriented shop at CafePress. YW fans will understand what I mean when I say that I blame Carmela for all of this.)
Well, Goodman is better. But now Squeaky really does have to go to the vet tomorrow…because the abscess definitely isn’t his only problem: the limp continues. (sigh)
After a long day of arguing with the computers, the cats, and the outer world, it’s going to be nice to fall down in a little while. Zzzzzz….
Squeaky has thoughtfully pulled the fur off the hurt spot. There is an abscess there from something’s bite — cat? rat? Probably not bat — which is now draining. Relief all around. Antibiotics tomorrow, though…
(sigh) The graphic above (which occurred to me very early this morning) is the only worthwhile thing I’ve gotten done today. (If you like it you can get one here: we have a tea one, too.) Everything else has been about sick cats. If you’re not a cat person, or feeling sympathetic, skip this blog entry….
Goodman — the all-white cat and the middle-ranked of our three males — found and ate something bad, early in the week, in his wanderings through the countryside. He came down with a terrible case of diarrhoea, went off his food, and initially stopped drinking as well: then the drinking picked up again, so we thought at first he was getting better.
But he wasn’t. He got very dull and lethargic, and was completely disinterested in food — so much so that when I offered him steak one night, he just stood there and stared at it.
When that happened, on Tuesday, I said to Peter, “He goes to the vet tomorrow.” And that’s what yesterday was about. Taxi rides, moaning unhappy cats, sitting around in waiting rooms full of greyhounds, waiting for blood work and other tests to get done, etc etc. Finally our vet told us that Goodman had enteritis — no surprise there — and he stuck him full of pain relievers, anti-diarrhoeics, and cortisone, and sent him home. “Bring him back tomorrow,” our vet said.
So we got up early this morning and did that. Goodman was already significantly improved over his condition just twelve hours before, though the diarrhoea was still a little bit with him (and we’ve had to follow him around the house with paper towels mopping up the occasional leak). Today he had some more shots, and we were given some diet food for him, and we came home again and relaxed a little in hopes that things would get back to normal.
Until we saw that Mr. Squeak, the senior male, who’s been working on extending his territory by the most straightforward method — by beating up on the male cat who lives down the road about a quarter mile from here — had started to limp. At first we thought it was a sprain. But a little while ago I got a whiff of him, realized that whatever else they may do, sprains don’t smell, and took a few minutes to check out his side more carefully. Turns out he’s got an infected bite or other wound buried under all that thick Norwegian-forest-cat fur, where he can’t get at it to clean it, and it’s paining him so much that it’s hurting him to walk…and enough that he won’t let us clip the fur to get at it and and clean it up. So now Squeak has to go to the vet first thing in the morning…get sedated, have the wound cleaned up, possibly stitched, get some antibiotics…
Ah well. In the good news department, for those of you who were asking, there are some more hardcovers of Wizards at War available in the bookstore. (There are some more advance readers’ copies as well, but I have to go into the store and add them.)
Oh, and for those who were asking how I manage to follow baseball season in Europe? It’s these guys — NASN, the North American Sports Network. They have a pretty fair schedule once the season gets going. (wry look) I wish that was right about now…
Somebody call Treebeard, because some people need their heads banged together. 
A property-line dispute between a builder and a lifelong Bronx resident is in an architectural stalemate – with a live tree right in the middle of a cinder-block wall of a new house.
…The city building code doesn’t actually prohibit anyone from building a wall with a tree in the middle of it, but live trees inside buildings require special construction, said Buildings Department spokeswoman Ilyse Fink.
“The plans do not call for a tree in the wall,” Fink said. “We’re going to send somebody out to look at this.”