Tuesday morning up before the sun blog in which yes, I have to go back to the office. It kind of feels like I’ve not been into the office in like forever, but it’s a new year for an old Gregalicious.
Yesterday was a wild day. I finished the book yesterday morning and turned it in (yay!) and then repaired to my easy chair to watch the LSU bowl game. The game was something, with LSU prevailing 63-7 over Purdue; LSU made Purdue look like a lower division team, and was up 35-0 at half-time, so it wasn’t terribly exciting to watch…but it was also airing at the same time as the Cotton Bowl, where Tulane was playing USC. I didn’t have very high hopes for Tulane, but I was paying attention to the score. As the LSU game wound down, USC was up 45-30 with less than five minutes left to go in the game, so I just kept watching the LSU post-game commentary and trophy presentation and finally switched over to see the end of the Tulane game, only to see there was like 20 seconds left in the game, Tulane had just moved the ball to a first down inside the ten yard line, and the score was now 45-39. They were reviewing the previous play for targeting, which was not called, and the game started again. There was a missed pass on first down, a caught pass rule incomplete on second down…which was reviewed and called a touchdown. Tulane then kicked the extra point to win, 46-45, in a massive upset for the ages and probably the biggest win in almost eighty years for their football program. ROLL WAVE! I still can’t believe Tulane beat a team that just barely missed the play-offs and could have played for the national title. And with the Saints also winning on Sunday over the Eagles, it was quite a weekend for football fans in southeastern Louisiana.
We gave up on Treason because we just weren’t all that interested in watching, and started Sherwood, a Britbox show, which seems interesting but we both kept falling asleep–tired, more than anything else–which I wasn’t entirely sure I was following, mainly because I kept dozing off. But it did look good, and it has a great cast, and so we’re going to stick with it for a while, at any rate. Today is also the day where my clinic job changes a bit; where we’re taking appointments every half hour (like pre-pandemic times) instead of every hour. I am not entirely sure how that is going to work, but today’s the day where we find out. Ah, yes, the joys of trial and error and finding the bugs and flaws in the system. I also have to catch up on my emails, which I let completely slide over the last four or five days while I finished writing the book. I have to say email, while incredibly convenient in many ways, has also sort of become the bane of my existence. I spend so much time on email, and sometimes email causes me great anxiety and stress. I’ve not had my inbox emptied in at least three years (!) and I am hoping that by the end of January that won’t be the case anymore. A goal for the new year is to keep my emails under control. We’ll see how that goes, won’t we?
I am not having any issues using “2023” as the date, but on the other hand I didn’t with “2022” until about October when all of a sudden “2022” didn’t look right.
But I am most pleased to have turned the book in. It still needs work, of course, but I need some time away from it so I can see it more clearly. I am also aware already of things that need to be done to make it better–the pacing in the first half is very off, the second half reads insanely fast–and there needs to be other tweaks and touches done for it. Taking January away from it is a good thing–by the time I start reading it again to edit the final edition in February I won’t remember most of it and that distance is sometimes absolutely necessary; it certainly helped with other manuscripts in the past few years. The deadline thing continues to be problematic and stressful for me; maybe the key is to go back to completing a first draft before asking for a contract in the future as I don’t ever want to be as stressed out as I was this past December, but right around Christmas the stress and anxiety snapped in my head and this weird calm descended on me. I didn’t even have to make myself work on the book these last few weeks, either; I just sat down and wrote three thousand words a pop (six over this last weekend) and before I knew it, there it was; finished.
And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. We’re having heavy weather today–rain, humidity, potential flooding and tornadoes–so going home this afternoon should be a really good time. Have a lovely third day of the new year, Constant Reader, and I will check back in with you tomorrow.
Queer and Loathing in America 