"Feral Moon" on StarShipSofa

My story "Feral Moon" came out in Asimov's last year. It's a work of military SF, somewhat out of my usual line, and I was pleased with it. It had been a long time since I'd written a solid novella. It dealt with the specific tactical issues of fighting your way through an inhabited asteroid (moon, really, this taking place inside Phobos) as well as the strategic issues of a too-long series of wars and the emotional issues of a recently dissolved marriage.

StarShipSofa has done an audio version of it.  Check it out.

The continued life of my one quote

As I've mentioned before, when you write things, you can never be sure what will catch someone else's imagination. While I think I have coined many sly and clever aphorisms in my time, the one that has had real legs is

This is my "rose red city, half as old as time"

This nice graphic comes from this article, which informs me that Billy Beane, the baseball GM who was the subject of Michael Lewis's book Moneyball, is particularly fond of the quote.  The article is nice in that it cites me very specifically.

I can't say as I've seen a lot of sales and interest coming to me as a result of this, but then, how would I really know?

Apologetics: explaining why what seems to a bug is actually a feature

I'm going to start out with my clever definition of what the word "apologetics" means, and then I'm going to relate to a somewhat ill-mannered thing I sometimes do while giving a critique in a writing workshop.  Ready?

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. Gross and Livingstone (why should an atheist have this massive tome sitting in the bookshelf closest his work desk? The world is full of mysteries. Even if you are an atheist) defines apologetics as "The defence of Christian belief and of the Christian way against alternatives and against criticism". But the part of it I find most interesting is when a religion has to explain some really weird thing in its scriptures or its traditions that outsiders make fun of. You come up with a mechanism. You explain how this seemingly out-of-context thing really is essential to the context. You create a story out bits of other stories. This can be an extremely creative act.

So I do define apologetics as explaining why what seems to be a bug is actually a feature. I was inspired to this way of approaching it from an episode of Roman Mars's wonderful podcast 99% Invisible, the one on interface design in SF movies called Future Screens Are Mostly Blue. Go listen to it, it's both funny and informative. What we all strive for.

What does this have to do with workshop critiquing? My, you are full of questions today, aren't you? Lost your negative capability again?

Sometimes there are things a writer has written that don't seem to hang together. Characters seem incorrectly motivated, events seem to arrive without cause. Maybe the author has a deeper scheme. Or maybe the author, being human, just hasn't worked things out thoroughly.

So coming up with an explanation for these disparate events, even if that explanation is clearly not what the poor author ever intended, can be....well, okay, it really isn't that useful to the person being critiqued. It's like doing backflips over a car wreck. This form of literary apologetics, particularly used in a mean-spirited way, is just not good form.

I like to think that wanting to show me where I'm wrong is a motivating force. Or is that just after-the-fact self-justification?

At any rate, use this on some piece of your own that has pieces you like, but just isn't jelling. What other underlying scheme might explain the observed phenomena? How many different coherent explanations can you come up with? Do any of them have features that stimulate your own thoughts?

Or do what Noessel and Shedroff, the subjects of the episode, do, and come up with other explanations for what doesn't make sense to you about works you love but find annoying in some way. It can be a really fruitful way of interacting with them, and is the basis for some lively fanfic.

Lighting each story with the embers of the last

In my new stint of writing, I have so far been successful in having one story thought about and ready to be started as I come to final words of the last.  Some days I have even finished one story and started the next in the same session.

This is a great way to keep the work flowing. But it does require that you have a story ready and thought about when the last one reaches THE END.

But tomorrow morning, when I get to my desk at 5:30, I won't! I finished a story this morning, and thought I would put another one together tonight, only to spend my time on a lot of essential business. It's nice to say that writing should always take priority, but there is a lot of other things that need to get done.

So I'm going to have to do what I don't like, and that is just start writing, hoping a story will emerge. Some writers thrive on this. I do not. Sometimes I do create something useful. More often, though, I create...a lot of words.

Wish me luck, and if you are up early, like I am, throw some narrative thoughts my way.

An explanation for opposition to female schooling

One thing we see in religiously fundamentalist cultures is an opposition to female schooling. This comes up in the news most often about Moslem fundamentalists, but is part of other fundamentalist traditions as well. The usual explanation for this is the kind of non-explanation about how these people just want to keep women down, women are threatening to their worldview, something like that. Those things might very well be true, but seem inadequate.

A couple of days ago I was listening to Russ Roberts's indispensable Econtalk podcast. It was an interview with Edward Lazear on the works of the economist Gary Becker, who died recently. One topic caught my ear: Becker's work on the opportunity cost of raising a child, where he, controversially, classified a child as "a consumer durable".

Becker was trying to explain why poorer women in the 19th century had fewer children than wealthy women, while, in the 20th and 21st centuries, it was wealthy women who had fewer children. If having a child is a choice (and to some extent it always has been, even before reliable contraception), the relevant resource is the woman's time, since women, even in our theoretically equalitarian age, do the majority of child-rearing.

So Gary reasoned, well, if it's the mother's time that's involved then you have to ask: What is the cost of using the mother's time? And of course in economics one of the most fundamental concepts is opportunity cost. It's the cost of foregoing the next best alternative. And so Gary then reasoned that the opportunity cost of a child was the price of the mother's time; and the price of the mother's time is what she could be doing elsewhere. And that related to her wage rate. All right, so what does that tell you? Well, in the 20th century, what that says is that when women had the option to work, or when most women were working, as they are now, what you'd expect is that women with high wages have very high values of time, and as a result, it's more costly for them to take time off and to have children, and so they tend to have fewer of them.

In the 19th century, it was poorer women whose time value was higher, given how valuable their labor on the farm or in the household was to the success of the family enterprise, so they tended to have fewer children than wealthy women, who, given the constraints they faced, could contribute little to their own families.

That's an interesting observation and explanation of facts otherwise hard to explain, the kind of thing Becker was known for.

My issue here is not that, but to note that if you have a cultural value of having lots of children, and see them as an underlying resource in your struggle against the world, and essential to the success of your enterprise, the last thing you want is educated women, no matter how much value you get out of their additional brainpower. The greater the value of that brainpower, in fact, the less likely they will be to want to give birth to and raise a large number of children.

So, if you accept those premises, refusing to let women get educated only makes sense. Of course, I was kind of deprecating "attitudes" as a way of explaining things, but have really just identified a deeper and less structured attitude than just wanting to subordinate women, so clearly the real explanation is even deeper than this.

In fiction, we don't usually dig underneath for the contingent material circumstances that constrain and condition the cultural attititudes that affect the characters and their personalities and opinions. Except in science fiction, of course, where sometimes that is the point of the story, and one reason the genre still has unexplored potentialities.

Do I have a story in mind to deal with that issue? Not yet.

Dozois's Best SF 31: my story

The Gardner Dozois anthology The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection came out a couple of days ago.  It has one of my stories in it, "Bad Day on Boscobel", set in the same universe as my novels Carve the Sky and River of Dust. It comes from the wonderful anthology The Other Half of the Sky, edited by my friend Athena Andreadis.

As I've mentioned before, Athena is the reason the story exists to begin with, since she asked me to contribute to the anthology, and then, when I was unable to come up with anything, suggested the subject, the life of a certain character, Miriam Kostal, in between the two books (Dust is kind of a prequel to Carve).

This is always a great collection, and I look forward to reading the rest of the stories in it.

And the story itself has generated enough interest that I am thinking about another story with Miriam and the characters she encounters in it. We'll see.

My definition of satire, from Readercon

I was on a panel on satire at Readercon last night, and, in response to something my fellow panelist Him Morrow said, I came up with this definition of satire:

"The goal of satire is to describe the Emperor's New Clothes in so much detail that anyone can see they aren't there."

Writing, and teaching writing

There are a lot of excellent teachers of the craft and trade of writing out there, particularly in my genre, fantastic fiction.  Many writer friends of mine teach writing, either occasionally, or as their main money-earning career. On Thursday and Friday I was up at Jeanne Cavelos's Odyssey Writing Workshop, in New Hampshire, where I was a guest speaker for a day.

I have always been reluctant to add that particular arrow to my professional quiver, for a few reasons.  First is the fact that there are so many dedicated, talented, and hard-working people already providing the service. The second is that I have a day job, and another skill set, in content marketing, that pays the bills, so any spare time I have I want to devote strictly to the creation of fiction. And third is probably that I did not come up through the residential workshop structure that already existed when I was a new writer, in the form of Clarion, and so have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about being a free-range writer, idiosyncratic and unpolished, with no stake in the system.

Then I try something like a day at Odyssey, and have more fun than I've had in a long time. I do like to perform, and I do have opinions about the writing of fiction, and it was fun to do both with a group of interesting and intelligent people. In some ways, I am at my best when volleying ideas back and forth with other people. Ideas come to me that wouldn't emerge any other way. And, yes, I do like the idea that something I worked out with a student might actually stimulate their own ideas, and lead them to come with things they otherwise would not have.

So, maybe, I might try this more, we'll see. I do need to be careful to position myself in this market as what I really am, kind of an outlier, not necessarily trustworthy or a good example to emulate, but someone who can be entertaining and fun while being respectful of the individual needs of the writers he deals with. Call me the Crazy Uncle of writing workshops. With a well-written warning about potential side effects, I could actually be useful.

WhyKly?

People who don't like doing something often try to "improve" it, that is, make it more into something they think they might like more.

Bicycling is a perpetual target for people like this.  They say that the problems with commuter bicycling are sweat, the clothing, the physical effort, the exclusivist attitude of those who already do it. Usually they come with some way to make bicycling more like a form of transportation they recognize. This usually means adding a motor.

The latest overhyped entry in this field is the FlyKly, a powered bicycle hub you can control with your iPhone. If that last part doesn't seem to make sense, since a handlebar control would be easier, you don't understand how important it is for people to think there's a reason they own those phones. The linked HuffPo article has all sorts of absurd reasons why using a phone to control your bike's speed is "smart", including the fact that it can suggest routes that are "more fun" and help city planners establish bike lanes.

As attempts to make bicycles into something motorized, and thus real transportation, go, the FlyKly is fairly reasonable.  The hub weighs nine pounds, which is not bad.  I don't believe the claim that it can push you at 20 miles an hour for up to 30 miles on a charge, though.

They never show the derailleur side. So unkempt, like bicyclists themselves.

How many people would bike to work with an electric assist who wouldn't without it? I suspect the number is small. The roads are still dangerous, and your bike can still get stolen. But one of the pleasures of bike commuting is the physical part of it. It feels good to get to work under your own power. But then I already do it, and so am not the target of this product.

On another note, there is the flying bike, debuted in Prague:

Yes, that's a dummy. Right now, real people are too heavy, and too sane.

This thing weighs 190 lbs, has six rotors, and requires 47kW from its hefty batteries. Just for comparison, a bike at 9 mph takes around 30W.  Could you get a person on it if there was a pedal assist? This is more something for a movie, to help the main character escape unexpectedly from pursuers, than a really useful thing, but I can see how much fun it must hav been to create it.

Pity the poor bicycle. It's a marvel of subtle technology, though always subject to improvement.  A human on a bicycle is the most efficient vehicle available, and uses our own muscles optimally. And yet, it gets no respect from most people. That's kind of fine with me. Things are getting crowded enough out there without people coasting along on electric bikes.

What I'm working on now

As I mentioned a while ago, I have pulled some old works out of the drawer to work on.  Some are stories my writers workshop gave me useful comments on, some have not been seen by anyone.

I've already sold one, to Asimov's, and another one has been revised and submitted elsewhere, so some progress has been made.

Now I am wrestling with a novella I tried to write a couple of years ago. I wrote a lot of words and never even got close to the crucial parts of the story. It's a story about free will and compulsion, set in a world of intelligent trees and other products of long-ago genetic manipulation. I keep coming up with ideas that distract me from the main point. This is probably my greatest productivity killer.

Can I wrestle the plot into submission by the end of the weekend? I'll let you know.

Severe editing done!

Last week I whined about having to cut my YA novel down from its obese 110K words down to (actually) 75K.

I flew on business several times last week, and did a lot of marking up of printed manuscript en route. Then, staring early this Saturday, I commenced implementing the edits. It was surprisingly easy to cut maybe 25K words out, making me realize I had been a bit self-indulgent in my text.  The other 10K was a bit harder, but still not the torture I anticipated.

And I did have it wrong.  Martha had asked for 75K, but I remembered wrong and was aiming for 80K.  When I realized my mistake, I had to go through again, making more small cuts earlier in the book, to get it moving faster.

So that was my weekend, from early in the morning until afternoon, though I did go out with a friend early Saturday night.

I'm under a lot of personal stress currently, and a lot of things have been going wrong. It's a comfort that this, at least, got done.  Now we'll have to see what comes of it.

The terror of severe editing

Starting is always the hardest part.

My agent likes my book (title now in flux), but says it is too long for its market.  And I mean far too long. It is about the same length as my previous books, which seems to be my natural length, around 100-110K words.  YA should be more like 80K. 

And she's right, both for this market, and in general. Most books should be way shorter than they are.  I say that myself, frequently. So why have I been so reluctant to savagely cut my own work? Because all of my words are so great? Do I really want to sell this thing?

You can tell I'm psyching myself up.  I have a couple of long car rides this weekend (elder child checking out McGill), and hope to make a dent in it.  This is where someone close to me and familiar with the text would be a big help, but my spouse never reads anything I am working on, and is only reluctantly persuaded to take a look after it is published.  A considerate, literate spouse with a ruthless streak would be a big help.

Killing your darlings is one thing, but contemplating darling genocide is another level of writerly hell. But this is whining. I am alone with this book. I'll let you know if I survive my struggle with it.

Jane Austen and Film Noir

I recently read Jane Austen's Emma for a book group I belong to. A few days later, I watched an interesting minor noir, Too Late for Tears. And I got to thinking about the connections between Jane Austen and film noir.

Short answer for the impatient: film noir is what happens when a Jane Austen heroine discovers that the man she's married has way less money than she thought.

In Too Late for Tears, from 1949, Jane and Alan Palmer are a couple who unexpectedly end up with a bag of obviously illegally obtained cash. Jane sees the windfall as a way of escaping their life of installment payments, Alan isn't so sure. That's not a good stance for Alan. Jane maneuvers around everyone who threatens her hold on the cash, and is eventually brought low only by a narrative contrivance.

Emma is actually not a good example for my thesis, since Emma Woodhouse actually has a fair amount of money of her own. But Jane Austen heroines are compelled to make sure their passions match their interests, and fall in love with men able to support them.

Sometime later, I also watched the biopic Miss Austen Regrets, which deals with a slightly fictionalized version of Austen's later years, when she has to face the consequences of choices she made earlier in her life, and struggle to support her family through her writing. Olivia Williams is great as Jane Austen, BTW.

Immediately postwar America was on the verge of a boom, but it must not have felt that way after a decade of Depression and half a decade of war. Early 19th century Britain's Industrial Revolution had not yet had significant economic effects, and it was still a static economy. In such economies, if one person has more, someone else has to have less. The pie isn't growing. There is only so much productive land. Thus, it's easy to lose out, and live the entire rest of your life in penury. There are few second chances, particularly for women.

The women of noir also feel that the pie isn't getting any bigger. As with Austen women, their physical attractiveness is their only real asset in the search for secure wealth, while their cleverness is the hidden asset that allows them to leverage that attractiveness to get what they need to survive.

Too Late for Tears actually stimulated a lot of interesting thoughts. Lizabeth Scott as Jane is an oddly compelling high-cheekboned ice queen, though handicapped by a stiffly waved do almost as ridiculous as the one imposed on Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity five years earlier. The trusting and slow-witted Alan Palmer is played by Arthur Kennedy, who would have much more fun as the roguish and sly Emerson Cole in the superb Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart Western Bend of the River, a few years later.

And the somewhat pathetic baddy, blackmailer Danny Fuller, is played by Dan Duryea, specialist at the half sniveling/half snarling villain. He is a few notches below his best here, and handicapped by a big suit that can't hide that he's a skinny little weasel. He would do much better as Waco Johnny Dean in the Mann/Stewart Winchester 73, the next year. Some people think of those Mann Westerns as Western Noir, which would explain the commonality of actors, but that's not the genre-slip I'm concerned about here. Worth thinking about, though.

If you add some Emerson Cole to the somewhat dull-witted Alan, more Waco to Danny, and make Jane, well, Jane, I think you'd really have something. The once-flirtatious witty repartee has turned deadly, the home economics are grim, the wife is ready to use her quick wits to figure a way out of this situation. But Darcy...I mean, Allan, has a few more tricks up his sleeve than he was allowed to use in the current version.

A static economy leads to existential despair. A static economy that was once a growing economy leads to rage and murder. We'll see if the current impasse in our political system returns us to noir as a way of life, rather than just a style.

Me and the government shutdown

I am a victim of the government shutdown, in a "First World Problem" kind of way:  if all had gone as planned, I would be hiking down below the North Rim of Grand Canyon today.  Instead, I am in my basement, typing this.

My annual hiking trip with my friends is something I look forward to all year.  And we had tried several times to get space at the limited North Rim campsites in order to do a good loop hike. We did the trial-by-fax application process (OK, my friend Paul did, by going into his office on a Saturday and sitting by the fax machine) three months ago. We finally got our spots.

Paul actually drove up there from Santa Fe to meet us, and found himself virtually alone in Kanab, Utah, as everyone waiting for a rafting trip, a hike, or anything else to do with the federal lands up there pulled out and home.  Now he should be home as well.

I will deal with my political reaction to this shutdown elsewhere. All I can say is that I hope I don't run into Rep. Randy Neugebauer on the trail anytime soon.

Picking up old projects

Now that I have turned my novel in to my agent, I'm turning back to some things I was working on before I really dove into the revision.

There are a lot of unfinished stories and other projects littering my mental universe. I have notes in various formats: an old composition notebook, bundles of notes on yellow 6x9 pads, bundles of note cards, crumpled sheets quickly scribbled on at work or while doing something else, emails to myself, even text generated by Dragon Naturally Speaking when I was unable to see after my eye operation...not each of these is done by a different personality, but it is still disturbing to come across having forgotten the original moment of thought.

I also have unfinished drafts, sometimes multiple ones.  Sometimes I have forgotten why I restarted, or what I was after with the new approach.

The one advantage is that I have completely forgotten how much work is invested in each piece, and so can look at them a bit dispassionately, seeing only how much work remains to get each one to submittable quality--or abandon it as not worth further investment.

But, jeez, there are a lot of them. My life has been in disorder for longer than I consciously realized, and big changes have been going on that I only recently really gotten to grips with. And these changes are far from complete.

I hope I have some time this weekend to bring order to this obsessive mare's nest.  I leave for my annual hike next week, and when I come back from that, don't want to return to something that looks like case files from a competency hearing....

Forced to proofread

I was on a business trip this week. I was doing something both interesting and stressful:  videoing analysts at the company I provide marketing for.  I had to learn how to set up lighting and sound, select and buy equipment, and then learn to use all of it. I think it all came out well.

But somewhere along the way I lost my Kindle.  I'll try to track it down today.  I don't favor the Kindle for regular reading, but when traveling or camping, it's great, given how much it can carry.  So I had no other reading material with me, and only discovered the loss in the departure lounge.

To entertain myself I was forced to do something I've been putting off: proofreading the scanned files from my backlist, starting with Carve the Sky, preparatory to turning them into ebooks for a new generation of readers.

I got maybe 15% of the way by the end of the flight.  This is going to take awhile.  But it is essential.  I'm resisting the urge to rewrite anything, though I do fix an occasional word choice I no longer agree with.

But, you know what?  The book's not bad.  I try to write things I would like to read, and Carve certainly qualifies.  Maybe it can find a new life as pixels, since ink on paper (its natural medium) just didn't cut it. The question is whether I can give the task the time it really needs, given that I want to keep writing new stuff too.

Gestation speed

The germ of the idea for Timeslip (or whatever--as I've mentioned, I'm trying to come up with a better title) came to me while I was a participant at the Rio Hondo workshop in the hills above Taos, NM in May of 2010.  Several other people had submitted sections of YA novels, and I thought "hey, maybe I can do that!"

I got up early one morning and drove off to take a hike by myself.  As I walked, the character and basic structure of the book came to me.  By the time I ran into too much snow to keep going, I had enough to get me started: my main character Doug, his father, and the device his father has invented to get into other worlds with other histories, the device that brings someone from one of those other worlds into ours, and gets Dad kidnapped.

Later that year, my family and I spent a week in the Adirondacks. Every morning I got up early and did experiments with the book. That's the way I get through the initial planning of a novel.  I pick some possibility and examine its implications, and its downstream consequences. I wouldn't say that's an efficient way to do it, but I don't have the gift of distinguishing fruitful possibilities from sterile ones. I have to take each one out for a fairly extensive test drive. I sat out on the porch, feeling the light grow over Long Lake while the family slept, and scribbled in what is now the first of a thick series of notebooks lined up near the desk where I write this.

The first draft went fairly quickly, by my standards, and I had it done by September of 2011.  Why, then, did I only manage to turn the thing in in September 2013?

Partly, it's because I'm an idiot. Or, to put in a way that is both nicer and more accurate, I have an "uneven cognitive profile" -- #6 in this quick essay on procrastination, by an online advice-giver, Dr. Alice Boyes, whom I've really gotten useful advice from. In many situations, my cognitive strengths allow me to skip over the things I don't do well.  But a novel, or a really busy job (as I have right now), sometimes exposes very real blindspots that I need deal with. Let's call that my UCP problem. Finding a way to detect the blindspots before they cause real problems is the main task of my self-analysis.

And partly it is that fact that I do work full time, at a job that requires a lot from me, and am my family's main financial support.  But that might account for one year of the delay, not two.

Despite my best "fruitful alternative" planning, I often end up in a narrative dead end.  I'm not particularly adept at working out complex plots with lots of competing parties, and yet, those are the plots I tend to favor.  Why not an entertaining picaresque, where one thing happens after another, and aside from a few coincidental meetings with characters from earlier in the narrative, there is no plot to speak of? I dunno.  The inspirations for those just don't seem to come to me.

So I ended up stuck several times, and had to work my way back out. I rewrote it, gave it to the Cambridge SF Workshop a year ago, and they gave me some useful advice.  Then, as often happens, I had too much to think about and fumbled and procrastinated. Was that wasted time, or useful gestation? Some of both. I did get a much stronger last third as a result.  Still shouldn't have taken so long.

On the topic of novel revision, the best advice I've found anywhere comes from writer Holly Lisle: her blog post How to Revise a Novel. Her ruthless scene-by-scene analysis really brings every problem out into the open. Now that I have incorporated her advice into my practice, I'm hoping it will percolate back into the actual scene construction, making the book "revision ready" in the first draft.

As I said, I'm hoping.

But, you know what?  I like this book a lot. I read every word while proofreading and line-editing this last time, and actually felt good about it. That's rare. Writing a younger protagonist, and striving for simpler language, forced me away from my love of imagery, background information, and complex language and into a sparer, more dramatic style.  I'm not giving any of those up, by the way. But I hope that when I revisit them in another book, I can use them because I want to, not because I need to in order to make up for other deficiencies.

It's Sunday morning.  I want to write a few stories before I start my next book. So, I will press "publish", get another cup of coffee, and get to it.

Done. Now what's the title?

Last night I wrote that I was almost done with editing my latest novel.  Now I actually am done.

I've been talking about this one for a while.  It's a YA novel about a teenager whose father invents a way to cut through to alternate histories--and then someone comes in through from one of these alternate worlds, kidnaps Dad, and disappears. I just reread every word of the thing without cringing.  I hope that's a good sign.

The problem now is the title.  It's working title all the way along has been Timeslip. But, as my writing workshop pointed out, it's misleading. It's not about time, its about worlds.  My friend Steve Popkes has pushed strongly for Crossworld. There are merits to the suggestion, but there's an evangelical tinge to the term, as you can see from this organization.

I like getting "World" in there. But putting that word first, as in Worldslip, crams too many consonants together. The same problem dogs my actual favorite alternative Worldswap. That's probably why this simple combo has never been used as a book title, as far as I can tell.  Crossing Worlds has been used once, but for a historical novel, not an alternate world adventure, so that's a possibility.

I often get stuck at this point. I want a title that lets the reader know at least a bit about the book.  IF anyone has any votes or suggestions, I'd be glad to hear them.

Teetering on the brink

For the past few months, I have been revising my next novel, a YA alternate history adventure.  At least the character is adolescent, and the language is simple, but I'm not sure it fits the current model of bonding-against-dystopia YA fiction.

And for the past couple of weeks, I've been doing a detailed proof and clean, and resisting the urge to do any deeper editing. As they say, no book is ever finished, just abandoned, and sweet noises this one makes, I'm leaving it on someone's doorstep soon.

And I'm a day or two from submittable version. It's been a long haul, my job has been stressful, and I'm in a frazzle.  What will I do when it's done? I'm not really sure.