I want to post an IRA wrap-up with pictures, but I don’t know if my computer will last long enough to let me do it. Halfway through the week at IRA what started as a minor annoyance has turned into me wondering if I should replace my laptop. A friend is going to look at it sometime next week and help me figure that out–hopefully it’s just something like the video card got jostled–and if it’s fixable I might be online sooner than I thought, but I have a feeling I’ll be mostly dark next week, LJ-wise. This is probably not a bad thing, because I have plenty to catch up one work-wise what with being in Toronto for a week.
By the time I get back, the world will have moved on from IRA, but I’ll be the slowpoke anyway because I think you’ll love to see pictures of our comfortable little booth, even if it is a week late. It’s just as comfortable to sit in as the pictures imply.
Thus teasing you, I leave you. Keep your fingers crossed for my poor little computer.

Having a great time here in Toronto. It’s a great city. I’m only seeing a very small portion of it, but my hotel is right on the water, which is of course a great view, and we’ve eaten at a couple really great restaurants.

And then there’s the show itself, which is full of teachers and librarians. We’ve met several principals, too, and there a so many literacy coaches and people who work with teachers in some capacity or other. It’s been really great to talk with all of them about books and helping kids learn to read and increase their reading skills and enjoy reading.

I also met Alivina Ling of the Blue Rose Girls briefly, but I’m sure she was as busy as I was. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to chat! And if anyone else is at the show, be sure to stop by the Mirrorstone booth and say hi.

Spent the afternoon at a conference at my church. The best kind of church singles’ conference is one in which you don’t actually focus on the “trial” of being single. My friend Cindy arranged for a coworker of hers, who happens to be the photographer at Seattle University, to come and teach us a class on digital photography. We spent four hours this afternoon talking about photography and picking his brain and then walking around the Seattle Temple grounds taking pictures. (We’d considered going to the Bellevue Conservation Gardens, but the temple was right next door to the conference so that saved us travel time.)

I found some nice shots of various things. My favorite from the afternoon:

And it doubles as a fashion show because I get to show off my new shoes and socks. I grabbed  Mary Janes on clearance yesterday the sa
me day that I happened to walk into J.C. Penney on a day they were having a 50% off (almost) everything sale. I walked away with entirely too many shirts (but granted, not as many as I walked into the dressing room with). And my personal Trinny/Susannahs would be proud–they follow all the Rules. And I got a great skirt. If “Trinny” and “Susannah” are reading this right now, yes, I’m bringing the clothes to Toronto and I intend to show off. 🙂

I am tempted to make that into a usericon. It would be kind of fun. But not tonight. I’ll have to post the other pictures later, because I’ve come to accept that I simply won’t get packed tonight before midnight. I’m off to Toronto at 6 tomorrow morning. If you come to the show, see you there.

It is such a lovely day today. Warm sunshine, flowers blooming… did I mention how warm it is? Lovely. So I took the manuscript I was editing and headed outside to the courtyard. The tables were already in the shade, though, and I wanted true warmth. I wanted Vitamin D, I tell you! 

And I got it, for about an hour. After a while, though, I realized it was getting really painful to read from the brightness. But it wasn’t until the bees came out that I decided it was time to come in. Actually, I think it might have been wasps, but I didn’t stay long enough to find out. The flowers behind the bench I was sitting on were blooming quite nicely, so I hope it was bees, but it could have been wasps attracted by the trash bin that was about 50 feet away.

Still, perhaps I got some nice color out of it, and perhaps my bones will thank me later. (Don’t you need vitamin D for calcium absorption? Maybe I’m just associating that in my head because milk always has vitamin D added. I knew the answer to this once.)

So now I’m
back inside, gazing longingly out the window (that’s a perk–I have a cubical by a window, and mostly my view is of treetops, though at the right angle it’s also of the front parking lot). But I’m off to relocate once again to the soft chairs in our library, which are the next best place to edit a manuscript compared to sitting outside in the beautiful sun. 

I’ve missed you, sun. Stay for a while.

So I had kind of lost faith in Lost. I didn’t watch it for a long time. But people at work were talking about it as if it were getting interesting again, so a few weeks ago I caught up on all the episodes I could online, and I’ve been watching it with my roommates. And I think it’s redeeming itself. Lots of good surprises, and they’re actually tying up some loose ends, such as just what the Dharma initiative is (kind of, or at least, where they went). But man, today’s episode? Creepy and kind of frightening. I hope it all comes together, but I have a feeling the last episode of the season (episodes? I don’t know how many are left) will leave me hanging.

Went for a walk around Green Lake tonight with a friend, and it was *so* nice to get out in the sunshine! I’ve got so much to do before I leave town this weekend, but I feel so much better for taking a break.

Got a laser pointer yesterday as a cat toy. This has been recommended to me before, but I didn’t know if my cats would really go for it. Surprisingly, Mogget, he of the “sniff, I’ve seen it all” p
ersonality, went wild over it. I’m afraid the batteries that came with it weren’t very strong, though–it was going visibly weak after just a few hours’ play (well, over the course of several hours, so it was actually not that many minutes, either). I think I might go grab a couple cheap watch batteries–the batteries that came with it might have been sitting around for too long and just gotten weak. But if only I’d thought to video his chasing it, because it was like he was a little kitten again. (He’s only just under two years old now, but he stopped being kittenish when I got Tildrum, who had enough energy for both of them.)

Good amusements for an evening, I must say. 😀 Now I need some sleep.

I’m afraid I won’t have much to say this week, as I have lots of work to do, tying up loose ends before heading out to Toronto on Sunday. 
But I might share with you a few links and a few pictures. Eventually. Pictures of what? Perhaps my overflowing desk? The beautiful sunny day outside that is wooing me? Don’t worry, I’m holding firm, sitting in my air-conditioned cube and going through a copyedit so I can turn over a book to typesetting.
Speaking of, I have to get back to that. More later. And perhaps pictures. Why not? I have to use the camera I’ve been hauling around for a couple days somehow. Which reminds me, I have a gift card for the camera store that I should go spend before leaving for Toronto. Suggestions for things to see if I have time? I’ve never been there and really don’t know anything about it.

Oh, and a note: I’ve been hearing so much from places like the YALSA blog and the news about Teen Second Life (which only allows teens, which is a nice safe place online for them) and Second Life, so I decided to give it a try a few nights ago, created an avatar and played around with the world for an evening. Does anyone here have experience with Second Life? What do you think of it? How does it compare to something like World of Warcraft (which I haven’t tried out)? 

I had fun playing with the avatar and everything, but it’s kind of scary for me, honestly, to walk around in a virtual world where there are other people who probably know what they’re doing more than I do. I’m a slow learner on stuff like that and I like playing with it, but I don’t really like the idea of having to stand on the street in full view of other people while trying on new looks for my avatar. Couldn’t there be some way of leaving the gam
e part and playing with your avatar before re-entering the world? It’s like changing your clothes on the street.

I do like the idea of being able to have your own little corner of the world, building a house or starting a business or something. But it seems like something that would really take a lot of time. How would you ever get anything else done?

So have I. How did it get to be Friday already? One moment I was hurrying into the office on Monday morning, trying to get there early to get back to a problem I’d had to leave behind at midnight Friday night–yes, I left the office last Friday at midnight, yikes!–and the next moment it’s Friday and I’m finally, finally taking a little bit of time to go through some manuscripts that people have been patiently waiting to hear back from me on.
The last couple of weeks have been full of me running from meetings to putting out editorial fires. Crazy things happening at the last minute that push everything else aside until you figure out what happened. Quick thinking on the part of everyone involved to make it work. Big sighs of relief when you know the book will still make it out on time, and even in excellent shape.
I’m sure if you work in another industry you can still sympathize. Sometimes it all comes piling up at once. Then you get a moment to breathe and realize just how much you need to catch up on to balance things out!
My goal for the weekend is twofold: to read, read, read, and to
sleep, sleep, sleep. I also just remembered that I am teaching a Sunday School class for my church this Sunday, which means some of that reading will be non-work related. But the goal is to get as many responses out so that my submission pile is once again under control. Then on to more editing, and I will at last be caught up before heading out of town next week. 
So if you’re waiting on hearing from me, thanks again for your patience.

I just returned–well, a couple hours ago now–from an outing to the mall. Me, the mall. Yes. This rare occurrence usually only happens when I have some occasion I’ve decided I need an outfit for, like the Christmas party that made me realize I had nothing nicer than a three-year-old granny-style dress I (sadly) wore to a friend’s wedding. It had been a June wedding, and I couldn’t find a thing that year that would look any nicer on me.

This trip was also motivated by an event, actually. In just under two weeks, we’ll be heading up to Toronto for the IRA show–International Reading Association, that is–and I wanted to find something a little nicer than last year’s pants and the tops that I’d bought pre-grad school. Nice as they are, they’re starting to fray.

The problem is that I never seem to be able to find good clothes consistently. I’ll make good finds, and then I’ll have a string of wasting money on clothes that seem okay when trying them on, or I’ll buy them out of desperation to just have something so I can go home. I have a closet full of clothes I wore once but never wore again because they didn’t fit right after one washing or I’d forgotten to sit down while trying something on, or any number of other silly mistakes. Then there’s the whole question of whether a color is right for me, or a cut, etc.

We’d been talking about What Not to Wear at work and I joked that I should have them come do me, but that I wanted Trinny and Susannah, not Stacy and Clinton (I just prefer the British one, for a number of reasons I won’t enumerate). But who has the money to spend what they give their people? ($5000 for the U.S. show, £2000 for the U.K.)

Coworker Shelly to the rescue! She has a WHOLE lot more fashion sense than I do, and also just plain knows how to shop. She’s Trinny and Susannah in the clearance racks, and knows how to be stylish on a budget (but also a little bit Stacy and Clinton in holding firm!). She and my other coworker Nina and I made an evening of it, and I think it’s the first time in years I’ve actually had fun while shopping. She also insisted that I must allow myself to get cute shoes, and she helped me go beyond my boring basic black or brown loafers. I even came home with a skirt and a shirt, and I’m going back tomorrow to pick up a few more things I’d left on hold (they’re cheaper tomorrow!).

So if you see me at IRA, you’ll know I have Shelly to thank for all that style.

The reason I tell you all this is because not only is Shelly amazing with fashion–she’s an author, too. Her book, Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress, comes out in September. If you’re a girl who’s ever played D&D, or who has ever thought perhaps playing D&D wasn’t for you, either way this book is for you. I personally never played a game of D&D until starting this job–had lots of friends who were gamers, but I didn’t understand it. This book is for the girl I once was two years ago (which was the time I started playing in our department’s weekly Eberron game–and it’s been such a blast!) and it’s for the girl I’ve become, 9th level monk about to take a vow of poverty and all (who still has to ask, “can I do this…?” so it’s not like I’ve become an expert). It’s not a Mirrorstone book, but it’s very teen friendly, too! Funny, observant, and all sorts of other adjectives that I can’t think of this early in the morning. Her alter ego, Astrid Bellagio, has a MySpace page where she keeps
a blog of her latest adventures and distractions in the game. Go check it out!

Let’s talk about what constitutes “requested” material. I’ve had it happen numerous times where someone will send me an email here and ask a question about a submission. I try to answer most of those questions on this blog in a general way that will benefit a number of readers, and I think it’s worth it to get these questions out to a wider audience to leave that email address up there. I hope this also helps the person asking the question.

Sometimes, though, I’ll get an email that says, “Can I send you something?” giving me the details that really constitute a query, and I point the person to the submission guidelines. (Though sometimes I wonder how they found the email address right under my bio saying “Go here for our submission guidelines” and didn’t seem to see that link.) And sometimes we’ll get snail mail queries with just the query letter, so we do the same thing–send a standard “here are the submission guidelines” letter, pointing out that if they don’t include a writing sample, we can’t consider the submission.

In either case, the response pointing the writer to the submission guidelines is not a “request” for their material. “Requested material” means that I’ve specifically said to the writer, “I liked your sample. Please send the full manuscript.” Anything else before that point is politely asking the person to follow the directions for submitting.

I don’t request so much material that I don’t remember what I’ve requested, so writing “requested” on an envelope of material I didn’t request just makes me question if you know how to find our submission guidelines and follow the directions.

I understand that some publishers ask for just a query, and some for samples, and some for full manuscripts, and it can get confusing.  

But the directions are out there on how each publisher prefers to receive submissions, and they’re for the writer’s benefit–if I don’t have a writing sample, no synopsis is going to make me know whether I want to say yes or no. So if I said I’d take just queries for unagented submissions I’d have added a burdensome step for my submissions reading. That’s just how we prefer it.

By following the guidelines a publisher provides, you make sure your writing will stand out, and that’s what’s most important.

And for good measure, our submission guidelines are here.