I know I said I was going to try and spend a week not thinking about Dreadnought or working on it, but the more I thought about it, the more the time frame looked unreasonable. Therefore, after finishing up day-job work this afternoon, I dove right into revisions after the downtime of only a weekend. Yes, well. The best-laid plans and all that jazz.
At present, I’m about 150 pages into an almost 500 page project, and I just keep telling myself, “It doesn’t have to be perfect. It only has to be complete.” And mind you, in order to keep my editor and/or beta readers from going blind with the suckitude, I’d also prefer for it to be at least somewhat good.
[Insert witty transition here.]
Anyway. As some of you are aware, we’re experiencing a bit of a heatwave here in Seattle right now, and yes, I’d rather it be too hot than to cold, but no, we don’t have any AC and the weather is particularly hard on the husband but I’m pretty much dealing with it all right.
So too the cat, oddly enough.
I’ve mentioned before that we have a weird bedroom, insulated sometime in the 1950s with enough additional wall filler to effectively sound-proof it. One side effect of this insulation is that it always stays somewhat cooler than the rest of the apartment — as the cat has figured out. And as we have figured out, if we put a reasonably powerful small fan in the window, we can keep that room about ten degrees cooler.
Here. To illustrate the point:
(And no, that’s not our new bedding set. We removed the comforter in favor of a light cotton covering, given the temperature and all. Behold the cat’s approval.)
To give you some frame of reference, my handy-dandy thermometer says it’s 85 degrees in there. Do the math, and that’ll tell you a little something about what our living room feels like right about now.
[Witty transition the second.]
In other news, I have freshly updated the Clockwork Century — as I’ve been doing about once a week or so. But to save you an extra click, please allow me to go ahead and point you directly at Sesquicentennial Madness.
You may be asking yourself, “What’s a sesquicentennial, and why are people going mad about it?” To which I would say — in short, it’s the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. And for more information on the subject, I suggest that you go poking around on that webpage, which is operated by my old friend Andrea Jones (Navy veteran and Civil War historian who has saved my fiction-writing ass on more than one occasion).
Upon that page you’ll learn many useful things, and you’ll also find an interview with yours truly — an interview about growing up southern/not-quite-southern, steampunk apologetica, and what prompted me to make the war such a significant part of my Clockwork Century universe.
So go on. Click around. Show her some love.
She deserves it.
