I’ve been writing, although not fiction, which is getting frustrating. I’m getting very fidgety to write more in my fictional universe! But I’ve been clearing out my old assignments on Blogcritics, which have been disgracefully neglected. I just posted two reviews over the weekend and I have two more to go. That actually feels pretty good. One of my reviews, of Cory Doctorow’s For the Win, was featured on the Blogcritics Books main page as an Editor’s Pick. That’s never happened to me before!
I’ve also been getting David Burton’s Blood Justice into the pipe. Its official release date is October 1, but the book is already available in numerous venues, including the Kindle edition. Right now the short runs of both print editions are on their way from Lightning Source, and I’ve updated the book page on BLUM with all active links, the PayPal buttons and downloadable mail order form. I’m happy to say that Blood Justice has been progressing into the supply line much more smoothly than The Longer the Fall did! I’m trying to ramp up my tweets, Facebook updates on BLUM’s page, blogging and so on–and it’s having immediate effects. Traffic to BLUM’s website and Facebook page has increased, which means I need to keep on updating. Gods, but Twitter is a time-sink, though!
That’s pretty much been my life since my last post! I made an unscheduled trip up to Dad’s on Saturday to help him with a technical muddle. I chaired Readercon Committee meeting on Sunday and that went fine. I’ve been feeling a little under the weather–I think I’m fending off some kind of virus. I’m exhausted, but don’t sleep well, I always seem to have a headache and sinus-ache, I’ve been slightly off-kilter. You’d think it was allergies, but I don’t have any. The wildly fluctuating weather doesn’t help. I had to hang all the laundry inside this week and that always makes me grumpy. It’s sunny, warm and humid today–80s, on September 29 in New England–but forecast to rain tomorrow and Friday. My sister is flying in from Chicago tomorrow and I’m picking her up at Logan in Boston; I hope the weather doesn’t delay her flight or complicate the pick-up. They just posted a “high wind alert” for exactly the time when her flight is arriving!
I did a lot of cooking (and dish-washing!) yesterday. I wasn’t really in the mood for it, but I needed the food. I got a lot of apples from Dad’s Cortland apple tree, most of which are scarred, bruised or misshapen, but they make delicious applesauce–which I then use in these fruit-oatmeal cookies that are practically a staple of my diet. I was out of cookies and bread, and I ended up making applesauce from scratch (peeling, cutting up and cooking a sink full of apples) just to make the cookies.
Plus, I came close to #breadfail for the first time in, I think, decades. I bake my own bread every week and it’s a very simple recipe, but this batch had too little flour and didn’t want to rise properly. It’s edible, but not terrific. I always use as little flour as I can get away with because that’s where most of the calories come from and I keep trying to winnow down the calories per ounce and get a lighter loaf. But with 100% whole wheat flour, if the dough is too soft it doesn’t have enough protein to rise properly, and I obviously hit the boundary wall on that. It wasn’t even intentional, either–I weighed out too little flour when I started and didn’t want to weigh more, so the poor results were just my own inertia! I meticulously calculate calories of everything I cook by weight (in grams), and sometimes it’s just a PITA.
The cookies, I will say, turned out unusually tasty. Nothing like using applesauce just cooked from fresh apples that were just picked off the tree. 🙂 I have enough for several more batches of cookies.
Fedex refunded the erroneous shipping charge on BLUM’s bank card. I haven’t heard anything further about the Search Local complaint. I’ve gotten very brusque with charities and whatnot who call me (even though I’m on the Do Not Call list), I just hung up on Planned Parenthood! (But jeez, $150 they wanted–are they kidding?!?)
Two of my friends lost their mothers last week, and another friend just started chemotherapy. It seems like there hasn’t been a day without a death in the publishing/writing communities or some mass murder or shooting in the news, including the ghastly one in Boston yesterday whose victims included a two-year-old. I need to catch up with the Globes, because if I don’t read the Globes, I don’t have newspaper for the bunny cage…and I’m scared to. 🙁 But at least we’re getting a brief respite from the political campaign robocalls.
I have now cycled to all of Season Two of True Blood, which certainly ended on a depressing note. I think it gave me an actual nightmare last night! 🙁 I’m not sure when I’ll be able to start watching Season Three. Much more happily, I can watch the new season of Fringe online, on Fox’s website, so my Friday cycling video is all set for a while. I sure have gotten spoiled: I’ve forgotten what it was like to have to wait a whole week to see what happens next!