Wednesday, February 22, 2012

in the darkest night rising like a spire

I'm a total mess and such an idiot -- I'm getting some sort of horrendous sore throat disease, and yet I'm still up at 3am because I was messing around with the formatting options for the print edition of Heiress. Stupid, stupid -- but it has to get done immediately, and it took way longer than I expected...but more on that in a moment.

I knew I was getting sick last night, but I pretended I wasn't. Then I woke up at five a.m. feeling like death. So I took some Nyquil, which promptly knocked me back out, and I slept until almost noon; twelve hours of sleep was apparently necessary after the week or two or ten I've had. When I did wake up, I still felt like death, so I took a shower and dragged myself out to find something to eat. I settled on chili, which wasn't great for my throat but was better than anything else -- the extreme downside my gluten-free life manifested itself when I got sick, since I realized that I couldn't have any of my comfort foods, and most soups have gluten in them due to the thickeners. Boo. After a late lunch, I ran to the grocery store to stock up on fruit, milk, and more soup, and then came home and started working around 4pm...

...and I really haven't stopped since then. I had to write a couple of guest blogs tonight, both of which took longer than anticipated. I also had some volunteer type activities to take care of, which were necessary since everything's slowly sliding out of control and I need to get things back in shape. And then I began my formatting odyssey to develop the print version of Heiress, which turned into a v. long, v. tedious process that required me to purchase a license for Adobe InDesign (thank goodness they have month-to-month licenses now, since it would have cost $600). Granted, I could have just formatted it in Word like everybody else, but I wanted it to look professional, and InDesign offers better font selections, better control over mirrored pages, better layouts, etc.

The downside of InDesign is that I knew absolutely nothing about it, so I had to teach myself as I went. But, eight hours later, I must say that it looks quite lovely. So I finally got the document uploaded to Amazon tonight, and will have to wait for them to review it, then wait for them to mail me a proof, which I have to approve before it goes on sale. So the print version may not get out on Friday as I intended, but hopefully it will go up sometime this weekend.

It felt ridiculous to spend that much time on it, but c'est la vie; while it's urgent for Scotsmen to get finished, it's even urgenter to get Heiress out everywhere it can go out. So tomorrow, I probably won't wake up until afternoon, but I'll spend the rest of the day starting edits on Scotsmen (and going to my writing group, which I would definitely cancel on if it weren't for the fact that they're discussing a chapter of my gargoyles book and I would kinda like to hear their feedback). I canceled on Alyssa, though -- it's one thing to sit quietly talking about writing while nursing some tea, but it's quite another to life weights and do cardio and generally attempt to kill myself.

I took Nyquil when I started writing this, so I should probably stumble over to bed before it kicks in. Goodnight!

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