dazed, confused, addled, and befuddled

February 12th, 2012

Thank you all for your kind congratulations on finishing my book. I’m starting to dig out my office out now. I’ve been working on this new memoir ever since Fun Home came out six years ago. So a lot of matter has accumulated. Not just related to the book itself, like this pile of drafts and sketches.

But all kinds of other detritus like a camcorder that died four years ago with a cassette still inside it. I couldn’t bring myself to throw a $500 object away, but fixing it would cost hundreds more. Plus I had to get the tape out. So today I took a screwdriver to it. It was not as satisfying an experience as I had hoped. Plus I cut my finger.

The disorganization has brought me to a standstill. To take any action I have to move something and there’s nowhere to put anything. I know it doesn’t look too bad in this photo, but it is.

But the most disorganizing thing is that my email is not working. I very wisely waited until I finished the book to upgrade my Mac to the new Lion OS, and switch from using their old synchronization service, MobileMe, to the new one—iCloud. Ever since I effected this “migration” on Friday morning, my new email is being sent to another galaxy, or into a black hole, or perhaps it has migrated to a parallel universe where it hasn’t been written yet, or has already become obsolete. Irksome as email can be, not having it is much worse. I feel completely unmoored. Even the Apple tech, with whom I spent three hours on the telephone, kept saying, “Weird.” He has now passed my problem along to “the engineers.”

I guess I’m coming online to tell you all this because I feel so offline.

done

February 5th, 2012

I finished my book last night!
I finished writing it months ago, and the Advanced Reading Copy went out weeks ago. But I still had a million things to do before it was actually finished. Hundreds of little drawing corrections, plus new art for the title page and endpapers and the case of the book. It was a long, hard, isolated slog. And now I’m done.

Here is my cat’s latest favorite spot. We bought this rotisserie thing to make chicken with because Holly loves rotisserie chicken but you can never get happy rotisserie chicken. We took it out of the box and immediately the cat got on the box and she hasn’t left. This is unfortunate because we discovered that the rotisserie thing is damaged and we need to return it but we can’t because the cat is on it.