The mystery of the untended blog

I don't know why I haven't been posting here lately. Been busy, and sick, and tired. But have been posting regular little tidbits over on Facebook. Somehow just haven't been in the mood to write longer entries, I guess.

After my last post here, I spent Xmas week in Chicago seeing Mary Anne, Kat, et alia, then flew to Louisville for a couple days to see Mya. Picked up a cold in Chicago, which is still lingering. It was never a particularly bad or debilitating cold, and it keeps seeming like it's almost gone, but it somehow nonetheless keeps leaving me exhausted and headachey.

(Yes, I had a flu shot. And I doubt this is flu, but who knows.)

There were several parties and such I'd have liked to attend on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day, but I was exhausted and sick and had just spent ten days in heavily social environments. So I stayed home and Kam and I watched/rewatched all three Toy Story movies.

Which brought my total number of feature-length movies watched in 2014 up to 102. I've been meaning to write up notes on my favorites, but haven't quite gotten around to it yet.

The other thing I've been spending a fair bit of time on is sorting through photos. Kathleen (who's been doing some organizing kinds of things for me) sent a whole bunch of my old photos and negatives (about 1,200 of them so far, with another few hundred to go) to digmypics.com, which has done a good job of digitizing them. So I now have digital versions of (for example) 60+ photos of my parents and my brother and me from when my brother and I were kids; those are tagged with names now, and approximate dates (some of them didn't have dates, so I had to guess) (hey, people, put dates on things! your descendants will appreciate it!), and I hope to start posting some of them on Throwback Thursdays.

I also now have about 120 digitized photos of my mother's family, including a couple dozen of her as a kid. Really neat to see. I'll be posting some of those eventually too, but there are more of those without dates, and they're harder to guess dates on. Also in that batch are some older ones, which I think show my mother's father in uniform with a small airplane and a parachute in the 1920s. And one picture from 1910, of a guy who might be an ancestor of my mother's mother, with a (not-very-helpful) note in Russian on the back.

(I'm struck by how well-preserved a couple of these eighty- to hundred-year-old prints are. I don't know if they were just printed on good-quality paper, or well-preserved, or what, but they look almost untouched by time.)

The majority of the newly digitized photos are from negatives of photos I took. I think I got my first camera in 1996, when I set out on my Wanderjahr (I have very few photos of myself between 1980 and 1996; I feel like my family more or less stopped taking photos at some point, though I don't know why); I think I got my first digital camera in 2002 (and stopped using film shortly thereafter); so I have about six years' worth of photos that haven't been in digital form 'til now. About 30 rolls of film so far, so on the order of 700 images. Including pictures from various costume parties, and the first photos I have of Mary Anne, and Wanderjahr photos, and photos from my first time in the UK, and so on. Really nice to have these all in digital form too, though they're not fully sorted/organized/labeled yet.

What else? I read Ancillary Sword; hope to write more about that at some point. Am now reading Long Hidden. Am also rereading old SH stories because I'm trying to put together a list of my favorites from my time as editor there. It is very very hard to narrow down the list. I started with about 85 stories (out of the 500+ that we published while I was there) and have managed to trim it down to under 40, but it'll be hard to reduce it much further. We published a lot of excellent stories there. Thanks, authors! Thanks, co-editors!

And speaking of sf publishing, I'm also taking steps toward setting up a small press of my own, but more on that another time.

I guess the other thing I've been spending time on is writing. I've worked on my novel every day for the past several months, though sometimes only for ten or fifteen minutes in a given day. I think the third draft is pretty much done; hoping to send it out to some beta readers this weekend. Am nervous, and don't want to let it go (but wait! I could polish another paragraph! or do another pass through the whole book cleaning up some particular thing!), but I think it's time. I had intended to be done with this draft at the end of August, then at the end of each month since then, so I think I need to just do a few last little things and then show it to people. Of course, that's what I said in August. We'll see.

Okay, enough. Think I'd better go do a little fiction work and then go to sleep; have been having a hard time keeping my eyes open for the past hour or so.

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