Lunch, and other matters

Oblige me by imagining this:

Slices of polenta, fried golden-crisp on the outside, meltingly soft within;

topped with a duxelles of mushrooms, carrots and shallots, enlivened with garlic and balsamic vinegar and perhaps a hint of chipotle;

topped with an egg fried over so easy it's practically louche;

topped with shavings of grana padano.

Alas, you have only to imagine it; I myself, I have to eat it...


But! Just to dispersuade you of the notion that a writer's life is all luxury and unct, here is today's Tale of Publishing, or rather unPublishing:

I wrote a book. We sent it to my favourite UK editor. She loved it. She took it to her committee, with a strong recommendation to publish. They said, "No, no: this is a genre we do not publish. We have no list for this."

Years pass. They hire a new editor, whose brief is exactly to build a list in that genre. We send him the book. He loves it. He takes it to the committee, with a strong recommendation to publish. They say, "No, no: we have refused this book already, take it away, send it back."

If there be a universe in which this makes sense, it is I think not one that I inhabit.


No matter, never mind. I was going to tell you something else, but I misremember it; so I pause only to mention that I will be interviewing the wonderful Kari Sperring next Wednesday at the BSFA meeting in London (as an inadequate stand-in for tamaranth, who is indisposed), and signing at Forbidden Planet next day - 5.00pm-7.00pm - with a host of fellow writers from the new NewCon anthology, "The Bitten Word". Vampire stories! How can you not be there, and there too?

Tech encore

Oy.

You guys were quite right, of course: the monitor has a switch. It was kinda staring me in the face, actually. Mind, I will insist yet that the symbol on it does not immediately say "this switch will shift between analogue and digital input" - but that's what it does, yay. So, I can run two computers at once, and I am.

At the moment, I amuse myself by reserving this one for internetty contacts and e-mail, all the onlinery, while t'other is for writing on. There are obviously good reasons for doing this, part security-based and part about focus: if I have no internet on my writey computer, then I will not be constantly ducking out to check e-mail and play on LJ, will I? It'll be like being in the Lit & Phil, all concentration and output...

Yeah, right. In fact, I suspect the opposite: that I will lose more time through having to duck from one computer to the other. Especially the way I have them set just now, sharing a monitor but nothing else, so that I have to change keyboard and mouse each time.

Not sure this is going to last. For the moment, though, here we are. (And for some reason, on this machine, I am much more aware of Dreamwidth's spellcheck working as I type: and I note that it doesn't know the word 'internet', nor yet the word 'spellcheck'...)