Long week
Or maybe I mean "weird week." I haven't been sleeping well, but I've been sleeping late. I've been putting in long hours at work and feeling like I'm getting a lot done, but then don't feel like I have much concrete to show for it at the end of each day, and I have two deadlines coming up very soon. Been working late, getting home at 9 p.m. too emotionally exhausted to deal with various things I need to deal with (various emails, various homeowner's association things, grocery shopping, cleaning up for this coming weekend's roundsing).
I should mention that I haven't read LJ in at least a month, and I haven't read most people's journals in at least a couple weeks. I'll probably do a quick catchup skim at some point, but the volume is feeling too high for me to look at journals unless I have a big block of time. I blame RSS feeds (for my feeling of high volume, not for people posting). (I'm half-serious about that, but elaboration will have to wait for another time.) So, um, if y'all have posted anything in your journals lately that you particularly want me to know about, drop me a note with a link. Also, a mailing list I'm on has had a huge volume explosion this week; I've been keeping up with parts of that, mostly the parts where the messages are short and don't require much thought, but it's also added to the general feeling of being deluged.
Oh, which reminds me: TNH at Making Light posted a link to my Economy and efficiency as motivations in fiction entry the other day. It's one of the few valid Trackback links I've received. Teresa's entry on the subject is well worth reading, as are most of what I've read of others' comments on her entry. Only I haven't read most of those comments, because there are something like two hundred of them. I'm always pleased when y'all post an extensive series of comments on one of my entries, but that tends to be on the order of like ten comments; TNH regularly gets hundreds of comments on a given entry (and in general imo the average quality of those comments tends to be quite high). I wouldn't be able to keep up with that--I would want to read all of them and reply to most of them, and it would become a full-time job. Anyway, I'm pleased that that entry is getting so much attention; a bunch of people have been linking to it.
It's been sunny out some days, overcast and gloomy others. I try to go out and stand in the sun for at least a little while every day the sun is there, and that helps a little. I'm pleased to report that I haven't yet run into my usual winter cold, which has been known to hit around October and lasts through December, but there've been occasional signs of it now and then for the past couple weeks.
And then there was looking at Peter's files the other night, as mentioned in last night's entry.
At some point--last weekend, maybe?--Kam and Gerry and I watched The Interpreter on DVD. I'll try and say more about it at some point, but for now I'll just note that I'm very glad I didn't see it in the theatre last April. It was billed as a thriller, but imo (although it's certainly a thriller) it's primarily a story about grief and loss and vengeance and letting go; it does some really powerful and intense stuff with that (quote from one of the characters: "Vengeance is a lazy form of grief"), but I couldn't have coped with it in April.
What all this adds up to is that I've been feeling kind of overwhelmed lately. I'm pushing myself to keep up the pace for the next couple weeks to meet my deadlines, but after I'm done with these projects I'm still planning to take some time off work. Looking forward to that.
On the magazine front, much to my surprise, submission volume has stayed at the high-but-not-insanely-high level. This week will probably end up being in the top ten high-volume weeks, but not in the top three. Which is a relief. And so far we're keeping up with the reading. Though I'm slipping behind on editing--got three stories in various stages of editing that I haven't had the energy to deal with this week.
There are, as usual, dozens of things I've been wanting to post about: sf awards, Lego churches, situation puzzles, discussion of RSS, discussion of XSL, why I like spoiler warnings, pointers to Rich's year-end sf magazine summaries--the usual assortment of stuff. But all that's gonna have to wait, 'cause it's past time I went to work.
Oh, but one more thing: remember that the deadline for She's Such a Geek submissions is this coming Sunday, January 15!