Sunday, March 07, 2010

I can has sympathy?

There's not much to LOL about it: By the time I figured out why my arm felt strange, it was 2 a.m. I drove to Group Health urgent care on Capitol Hill, skirmished with a dozen Goths toting beer out of the Safeway, and eventually convinced the doctor on duty that the little burning bumps on the inside of my right elbow were, indeed, an outbreak of shingles. Fortunately, my Group Health medical record showed that I get shingles on weird dermatomes (like my right knee). They gave me medicine, I took it, and was home and in bed by 4 a.m.

Between the middle of the night adventures and my cold, I was a real zombie at Potlatch this morning. I was surprised that I had to keep saying "you don't want to get to close to me" to people. I felt like all they had to do was look at me and they wouldn't want to get anywhere near me!

However, it was worth going to the convention. I got to hear Eileen Gunn read a hysterically funny story (a collaboration with Michael Swanwick) about an inept time traveler, and saw David Levine's presentation on his two weeks in a Mars exploration simulation in Arizona.

By 3 p.m., I was ready to come home and just -- oh, wait, there was a meeting for the bid committee for the 2011 Discworld convention in the living room at 4 p.m. When that wound up, it was time to sit down and write a blog post that a client needs for tomorrow.

I did manage to do a little more work on the rewrite of my story, "Four Lakes," that got critiqued on Friday. The critiques were clear and helpful and it's a much better story now. I'm going to let it cool for a couple of weeks before sending it for a second round of comments. If it makes it past that hurdle, it might become the first story I've ever submitted for publication.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous5:27 PM

    You have my sympathy, MT! Hope you're feeling better today.

    Btw, the time-traveler story wasn't really a collaboration between me and Michael -- just a story that I wrote based on his idea. He cannot be blamed even partially for the story (unlike our actual collaborations, in which we each take all the blame for mistakes).

    I may have misled you, however, because after I finished reading, someone in the audience asked, "What's the difference between this and collaborating with Michael Swanwick?" And I replied, "There's no difference: he sends me a piece of piece of prose with instructions about what to do next, and I ignore his instructions."

    But the real difference is this: if it's a collaboration, we share the credit and split the dough.

    Thank you muchly for the great write-up, especially with you in the throes of a shingles attack!

    Feel better fast!

    Eileen Gunn

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