Serendipity

Well, I've gone a bit quiet lately, admittedly, but it's been for good, honest reasons: I finished my paper - in the predictable last-minute chaos of "Aaaarrrrggghhhh-I-have-negative-time-to-write-six-thousand-words-and-I-know-nothing-nothing-NOTHING-WHY-GOD-WHY???", but it's finished nevertheless, and, if I haven't learned how to write without ulcer-inducing panic by the age of thirty-two, then I think it's reasonable to assume that this is my standard modus operandi for the rest of my life. It's not the best thing I've ever written, but I'm pleased with it and happy to have it sent off. Let's see if it makes publication now; it's a little on the short side, but fingers crossed.

Good God, did I just write those words? "It's a little on the short side"? Coming from me? About something I wrote? Could someone just quickly check outside and see if there are any other harbingers of the Apocalypse? kthx. I'll wait.

In other news, I've been carrying on with the final final FINAL edits of The Edge of Heaven and am almost finished now, which is scary, but in a good way. The intransigent middle section has been transigented. It is now transigent. I have even re-read it a quite, quite obsessive seventeen thousand times (possible hyperbole) and it seems to confirm the transigency report on fanatical review. So then I got to the beginning of the third act and was absolutely certain that I'd taken a shot at re-writing it during the doomed 2009 blitzkrieg but couldn't find any evidence of the rewritten scene on my hard drive. This was a cause for panic, as I had been in the habit of saving everything onto a pen drive until I abruptly (and predictably) lost it last year - fortunately, after I'd been beaten around the head with the stupid stick by enough people to back most everything up onto the hard drive - but the only possible explanation was that this draft that I'd been working from was not the most recent draft. Worse: the most recent draft must have been on the pen drive when it disappeared. Luckily, some of the folks with the stupid stick had also known enough about computers to recommend that I back stuff up to a... thingie, I don't know. One of those thingies that stores stuff in cyberspace for you. A cyberspace file storage thingie. There's only so much the stupid stick can do for the technologically illiterate. And it was there that I made the dramatic discovery: the existence of a hitherto unsuspected seventh draft!!! Ach, du liebe! Sorry, I've been reading the most fabulous fic site recently and that term crops up a lot.

Now, remember I was saying that I didn't know how much damage Insane 2009 Rach had done with the Insane 2009 Purge? I'd been quite pleasantly surprised at how little of the flesh was hanging from the skeleton of my poor, eviscerated baby. Turns out, Insane 2009 Rach, in serial killer style, had been hiding the actual carcass in cyberspace this whole time. So it seems that I've been working off of the last, decent draft before the insanity began, without even knowing it. All right, Insane 2009 Rach had a moment of clarity with the cytokine storm scene (impressed? Be impressed! You have no idea how hard it is to research stuff like that when you have no background in human molecular biology!) and I'll have to do an unexpected sweep through of the cannibalised remains at some point and see if there's anything else good that might transfer over, but, all things considered, it could have been much worse. I like this novel. I would like to release it on the world at large. If anyone has any inspiration (or a publishing deal that they'd like to give away), you know where I am.

Also: remember I have cake....