Impeccable Timing
My body apparently has the worst timing ever. Although I suppose that it did hold off until after my birthday, which is something.
The weekend was lovely. The Brisbane Writer’s Festival was on, and I went along on both days to meet up with friends and listen to the talks. On the whole, they were interesting, but less focussed on the writing than last year. For example, what I was hoping would be an interesting talk about writing erotica turned out to be three women talking about sex – hilarious, but not exactly what I had gone along for. One of the best parts of it was the fact that two of the panel clearly didn’t like each other.
We managed to get to the talk about copyright, which was handy. Lots of good information to be had there, though they didn’t really touch on e-publishing rights much. I’m relieved to know that copyright is automatic in Australia – none of this need to register that I’m told is present in the US. If you make it, it’s yours.
The other really interesting talk was by Jeff Lindsay (author of the Dexter books), a psychiatrist, a criminologist, and a philosopher. Psychopaths are fascinating people – broken and a little bit scary. Two parts of the talk saddened me. First, ‘pscyhopath’ and ‘sociopath’ are used interchangeably in the industry, lumping those who have a mental/emotional issue in with those who go out and actively hurt people. This bothers me. Second, they gave out some statistics for just how many people are believed to be sociopathic (I’m going to use the terms to mean different things, dammit). Scary. I could go on about this, but I might save that for another post sometime.
Lots of food for thought there – and lots of material to be wound into writing later.
On Sunday night, a group of friends came out to dinner with me, and insisted on singing ‘happy birthday’ in the middle of the street. Embarrassing, but touching. Bless ’em. It was a good night.
On Tuesday, we had a big deadline at work. All of the ticket work had to be finished off so that we could start publishing our documents for our release at the end of the month. Needless to say, there was a lot of running around and tying up loose ends.
This morning, I took up the reins of Team Leader to run the publishing process (which takes about two weeks). The current TL is training me as we go.
So yesterday was the perfect time for me to have a cold come on. My head is stuffy and heavy, and my chest hurts even more than usual. I can feel it trying to settle in my chest and keep wondering if this is going to descend into pneumonia like it did in March. Awesome.
I can’t afford to take time off right now – we’re crazybusy at work, I don’t have the sick or leave time to take, I have to learn all of this, and it’s not stuff I can do from home. So I’m loading up with cold meds and hoping that this doesn’t develop into anything nastier. On the plus side, I don’t feel much worse today than I did yesterday.
I have warned the folks that I probably won’t be able to do my birthday dinner on Thursday, and the dinner I had lined up with friends for Friday isn’t looking great either. I’m supposed to be supporting my Triading buddies at Gen Con on Saturday, and right now I’m just glad that I didn’t make any promises to play. Argh.
So, yeah. This week’s going to suck. I’m pretty much working and then going home and collapsing. FE (my new project with some friends) is going to have to wait, and AB is probably not going to be as good as I’d like it to be. I will try to keep up with the beloved blogfic, though. Wish me luck!
Naomi says:
Awwww, poor thing 🙁 *hugs* I hope you’re feeling better soon.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Mel says:
Thanks Naomi! Me too. I’m not getting any worse, so here’s hoping it stays that way, at least!
September 17th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Svenja says:
Glad you had a good weekend! I’m sorry to hear about the cold though. That really sucks. I hope it clears up soon – stay warm and look after yourself, okay?
And I think we’ll all understand if you fall behind with AB – you’ve been such a trooper so far! Things are still intriguing though… it’s like reading Lost or something, every time there are more answers and more questions, it’s awesome. But like I said, if you need a break, you need a break, don’t feel bad. I’m sending positive vibes your way, and I hope you feel better soon!
September 17th, 2009 at 11:05 pm
Mel says:
Thanks, Svenja.
I’m plunging ahead with AB – there’s so much to get to, and I’m too determined to let it fall by the wayside! On the plus side, the cold is slowly getting better, so hopefully I’ll be back on-form soon. The posts aren’t as good as I’d like, but I think I’m throwing in all the curveballs and questions that I want to! Lots more to come on Haven.
September 20th, 2009 at 7:06 pm