mmerriam | Turning 42

I guess that makes me The Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Cool. What was the question?

Thank you, everyone, for all the kind birthday wishes.

I'm not one of those people who gets hung up on birthdays and getting older. The way I see it, having another birthday and getting a year older is much more preferable than the alternative.

It is still early, but so far my birthday has consisted of laundry and dishes. Soon, I shall take a shower. Later I will put away all the stuff from last night and drag the desk chairs back into the study. Exciting stuff, isn’t it?

Don't worry, there's been a whole lot of fun had by everyone this weekend, which is when all the birthday stuff happened (though it was pretty low-keyed), because you know, with my actual birthday falling on a Monday, everyone else is at work.

I'm making good but slow progress on revisions of the Phantom Streetcars novel. I'm hoping to be ready to send it out to my beta-readers by the end of March. I'm also most of the way through a beta-read on someone else's novel and a crit of a couple of friend's short stories. In between, I'm reading a novel and catching up on all the short story magazines I've failed to read in the last couple of months.

As I was telling

porphyrin, one of the problems with this is, I've begun to realize just how bad at this I truly am. No, really. I'm not sitting her crying "I am teh sux and I should never write again, oh woe is me!" and I know I don't suck as a person (I think). Not at all. It's just reading all this fine work makes me understand that I'm not very good at what I'm doing. But all I can do is shrug, put my head down, and go back to work, because what else is there to do (besides quit, curl up into a little ball of misery, and wait around to die, which is not a viable option)?

In other news,

careswen and I are going to move the web site this week. I've been hosting for free at mn.rr.com, but since Comcast bought out Time Warner Cable in Minneapolis, I need to move the site. The web site at the mn.rr.com address will go down on the 23rd. Hopefully we will have made the switch over to sff.net before them. If you get to this blog by way of my website, go the blog's direct link and bookmark it: http://mmerriam.livejournal.com/

The url for the new web site will be posted here, and I'll send out an email to everyone on the mailing list as well.

Well, I need to start more laundry, unload the dishwasher, shower, and get to work on my promised crits.

In Peace