Reading Week

All the category two items are fixed, and the MS has been spellchecked, exported, and sent to the copy shop.

I've kind of been a grump this whole weekend. Natalie Goldberg once wrote that she's irrationally angry for a while after finishing a novel, like she carried these characters on her back over jagged mountains and now that they've reached their destination they just skip off without a how-dee-do. I thought she was nuts, but now I think I know what she means. I feel kind of like my four best friends just moved cross-country together and I have no idea when I'll see them again.

Good thing the next step to my revision plan is Reading Week!

As I've mentioned before, at my enchanted hippie woodland wonderland college we had something called Reading Week, which was a really just week off from classes to study for midterms. I've always loved the notion of a week in which reading is the main thing you're supposed to be doing, instead of the thing you're doing when you should be doing other things.

This Reading Week is intended to serve several purposes:

*give my grumpy-ass self a little vacation, so I can come back to revising with a better attitude.
*help get the story out of my head, so I'm ready to read it with fresh eyes.
*read some books that include elements from my own book, so I can see how other authors have done it.

I have a stack of books awaiting me, some already in progress. The only one I'm committing to finishing this week is What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: Everyday Life in Nineteenth Century England for research. Now, The Sacred Talents is an Alternate Historical Fantasy series, so it's not like I need to worry about being historically accurate, since there was no time in history that that King Francis II lost the British Isles to France and was forced to relocate the Crown to the New World. And I have been doing research as I write. That said, there's a lot of little stuff I just don't grok about which servants are referred to by their first names, and which by their last names only, and which by Mr. or Miss Whoever, and all that other nitpicky bullshit that seems psychotically complicated to a relentlessly informal Amurrican gal like m'self.