So, for a change, let’s have a touch of spring in the office picture photo! This one is from the spring of 2020, when I discovered that–alas–my lovely lilacs were prone to having ants on them, which became a challenge for bringing them indoors to admire. Sigh. But that was a lovely year for lilacs…and you can see some of the writing books on my office shelf. One of my office bookshelves, anyway.
This ended up being a fairly busy and productive week. For once, a lot of stuff got crossed off on the to-do list. I was thrilled to see it, but…sigh. Most of the stuff that got accomplished had nothing to do with drafting, and everything to do with production, promotion, and community service work. No craft work got done; and the most writing was finishing off and uploading a chapter to the Kindle Vella project. I need to pick up the pace on the drafting side of things. On the other hand, this week’s chapter was one of the difficult ones, because my characters decided that they wanted to be romantically involved. That provides a challenge because while they are formally married, the contract they signed requires them to negotiate intimate relationships, including whether they decide to reproduce or not. No, this is not near-future. This is far-future, in a somewhat puritanical world view where marital associations include contractual agreements between persons (sometimes of different species) who want the legal structures and protections of a marital agreement without the reproductive or intimate aspects. Everything is contractual in the Federation of Sentient Worlds. Doesn’t mean there isn’t room for love and intimacy, just that those get negotiated for the protection of all parties involved. That’s one reason why Federation Cowboy is taking me longer to draft than I expected.
I’m also circling back to some breadcrumbs I dropped in earlier chapters which are actually somewhat relevant to the story. This book is becoming more complex than I first thought it would be. Which is a good thing, really.
Additionally, all the discussions about A.I. this week had me going over to some psychometric resources I know about (psychometrics is the study and creation of cognitive measurement) to see what that group of experts had to say. It’s somewhat more nuanced and more precise than a number of the popular journals are saying, and I have much more confidence in psychometricians than I do in tech folks who don’t necessarily understand the gritty details of cognition. Digging into those journal articles was a heavy slog, however, and made me realize that while I had to think a lot about it, I still possess a better understanding of what they’re talking about than people who haven’t worked adjacent to psychologists engaged in this study. I’m contemplating printing the articles out so that I can highlight, underline, and otherwise process the information in a form that works better for me (I simply don’t do well with deep reading on electronics. Part of it is the need to refer back, which is more difficult, and the note-taking process is more challenging electronically. Just the way I process). I suspect that I might have material for a blog, at least, if not an article, and there may be material for more than one article or blog in this rabbit hole. So I plan to allocate some time to this work in the next week, just to see what the possibilities are.
I discovered that the books I have up on Ingram are also available through Bookshop, so I spent this week putting those pieces together. I now have a shop on Bookshop, where I’m coordinating my series books and getting them together.
This being the first week of the month, too, I had a bunch of first-of-the-month things to pull together. Appointments, Zoom hosting, and more.
And, on a personal note, I seem to be spending a LOT of time lately updating my underthings. Well, it has been a few years, and some things wear out. Hopefully that ends reasonably soon. Still haven’t bought the new office chair because every time I look, they’re either not suitable or else the reviews are horrific (I always always always look at the one star reviews first). I want a chair that either doesn’t have arms or has arms that can be put up. That works best for me ergonomically. The absolute best chair–a rather expensive one, that I tried out at my son’s and would absolutely work size-wise, has ARMS. That while can be moved, still have a section that comes attached to the bottom, and will force my mousing hand into a position which it won’t like. SIGH.
Ah well. At least I seem to be getting stuff done. And promotion keeps happening.
Onward!
