Tweaks restored, more or less

[annathepiper]

Well, just because it annoyed me to leave the tweaks un-dealt with, I recoded everything I could think of tonight. I also saved the code fragments out to a local file on my hard drive this time, so I can actually restore them if I lose them again. Yes, folks, she can in fact learn. (Now if I can figure out why the external stylesheet I put in keeps occasionally not working, I'll be on to something here.)

Aside from that, it's been a very, very, very long week. We had a big ol' adventure at work involving attempting to patch databases and operating systems both on a couple of mission-critical servers, a thing which desperately needed to be done and which had not been done in well over a year. Needless to say, with over half the time being less than a year on the job, the process we cobbled together to take care of this failed in explosively spectacular fashions. We've had two big meetings this week about that already, trying to figure out what the heck went wrong and what we can do next time to fix it. Though I will say that I do deeply appreciate that the overall tone of the meetings has been positive, focusing strictly on not only identifying the problem areas, but working towards solutions to these problems. So that's good, even though it's been kind of exhausting to deal with.

My thyroid levels have also gone wacky again, though, which is making the week long as well. Dropping back down to 137mcg was apparently extremely premature, 'cause after a few days at that dosage I've gotten sluggish again and my weight's started creeping back up, which is extremely annoying. So is the impact it's having on my ability to not only write, but be cheerful and determined about writing. Thyroid wonkage also tends to make me excessively irritable too, I've learned. Plus, the sleep problems have returned, and on top of it all, it's gotten gray and gloomy again.

(Just a dandy, dandy state of affairs to have going on when you've also gotten a rejection letter, let me tell you.)

So I'm taking the 150's again until things stabilize, and then I'll see about alternating between them. I don't see the endoc again until November. But at least her assistant has been very helpful in fielding phone calls from me when I need advice. And hopefully I'll keep squeezing at least a few words out of my brain.

solarbird is continuing to improve, and the PT folks have her walking down and back up the hill at least once a day now. They've also told her walking down to the shops is reasonable. So hopefully she will be able to walk with me to the shops this weekend for Sunday market.

I've now done my first run through the new Carbon Leaf album, Love Loss Hope Repeat. Picoreview: not grabbing me as much as Echo Echo and Indian Summer. Definitely closer to Indian Summer in feel, but I'm not necessarily hearing as many repeat-play catchy songs here yet. Gotta give it another spin, and will post longer commentary this weekend.

And since I haven't done an Eowyn Challenge update in a few days, here are the numbers.

Saturday through Thursday miles: 15.15 (walking mostly, but a little bit of treadmill)
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1360.05
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 51.05
Miles to Isengard: 432.95

Comments

[wildshadowstar.livejournal.com]

Sorry I haven't replied earlier about your rejection letters. I wish some company would say that they would be picking up one of your stories. Is there enough information for you from the rejections to go back through and revise the material?

[annathepiper]

Not with the rejection I got for Lament of the Dove. All that the editor said was that while the "material was well-written" (which actually pleased me), she just was not quite sufficiently taken with the book to add it to her company's list. Which I can kind of deal with. As I told another aspiring writer friend of mine, this entire process is so very, very subjective. It's absolutely possible that even if you've written a solid book, it may just not click with the editor or agent to which you've sent it. And if they just don't like the book, you can't exactly expect them to go ahead and make an offer on it anyway.

What this tells me, ultimately, is that I did come pretty close. I just need to think about ways that I can take this book and push it the little extra distance to make it really stand out. I've already got some thoughts about what I want to do to it.

Meanwhile, Faerie Blood hasn't yet been rejected by the same editor. I'm still waiting to see if she gives me a "no" on that one as well. And I did get a very good rejection from Luna on it--which did have some solid suggestions for things to do to improve the novel. I am still trying to decide if I want to take the time to go back and do another draft of that book. The reason I haven't decided to do so yet is that I'm trying to get at least two or three novels into circulation, and it's very time consuming in general.