Baby, it’s cold outside. It was 6 below zero (Fahrenheit) at 9am when we left the house this morning for the Christmas Pageant and concert at church, 3 below when we left at 2pm, and is still 3 below now at 7:30pm. That’s before wind chill. We did have a salt truck come up our street last night around 11 while I was shoveling, but it has been so cold that the salt doesn’t have any effect.
Tomorrow, it’s supposed to go up to 11. It goes to 11.
I did the world’s longest post yesterday, so I’m going to keep this short. Here we go:
Running: Not much lately, and none today — too much going on this morning. Today was the Christmas Pageant at church, and Unfocused Girl gave an outstanding performance as the Archangel Gabriel (“Gabe,” to her friends, the Archangels Mike and Ralph). It was also the annual Christmas concert, and Mrs. Unfocused was the soprano soloist; she sang Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium, and then Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, as a soloist and with the choir. She was — as usual — mesmerizing; she’s got pipes.
Yeah, I’m bragging on my wife and daughter. Deal – it’s my blog.
iPod: I’ve been getting an education in writing science fiction and fantasy from the Odyssey Writing Workshop podcasts. Odyssey is a six-week residential writing program for science fiction and fantasy writers, and they’re putting a number of lectures by established authors and editors from the workshops out as podcasts. I don’t recognize all of the speakers, but they’ve mostly been very interesting.
Writing: Not so much. I’ve gotten some good work on the outline of Project Hometown (almost entirely during my commute), but I’m still mired in the character synopses for the minor characters. I haven’t gotten much done on the revisions of Meet the Larssons, because evenings have been a little jammed. I’m still on page 107 of the original manuscript, but I’ve written several pages by hand to be inserted there, so I’ve made at least a little progress.
As a side note, Agent Kristen at Pub Rants has posted her own statistics for the last year, and they’re very impressive. Most impressive are these two:
2
number of new clients35,000
estimated number of queries read and responded to (and yes, that is up from last year)
Two new clients out of 35,000 queries. She’s just one agent of course; there are 424 agents listed at the Association of Authors’ Representatives website. Still, those are intimidating odds. Happy New Year. Time to get back to the revisions.
Happy Hanukah, everybody!
The Unfocused Life 
I stayed hunkered down in the house today. There was no way I was going to go out there. You had good reason to go out; you can’t miss the family performing.
I was at the in-laws in Chicago last night, I am no longer goingbto complain about the lack of plowing here. I didn’t think I was going to get down the street, and I have AWD. It was nice of them to put some salt down on the one day where it will have no effect. Brilliant.