Caught more than beads at the parades.
Feb. 18th, 2010 10:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nolawitch58I've been sick now for four days. The clinic was closed Tuesday so I went to the doctor yesterday and got something to kill the coughing. I feel better, but not good enough to go to work yet. However, that doesn't stop my brain from coming up with a better way to run test cases for the upcoming conversion over my bowl of breakfast cereal. Whoever designed that went a little overboard. They created one spreadsheet for the testers' actions going down a column and another containing the actual test data going over several rows. Why not combine them? Have the test steps, such as Tab to and enter field data, appear on Row 1 above the name of each field on Row 2 and the actual test data appear on Rows 3 through whatever. Seems cleaner, even to my recently-fevered brain. The testers wouldn't have to be toggling back and forth between two open spreadsheets.
My focus group consists of a busy bunch of people. I should have known that the one copy I got back a week later was an anomaly. She reads like I eat potato chips anyway. Crunch away at the tasty goodness and soon the bag is empty. Hubby is reading it too. He's convinced I need to rework the Prologue. I looked at it again and can't see anyplace I could trim without losing integral foreshadowing of plot. I think the first four chapters are pretty solid. I'm going to be adding more interactions with the ghost, who doesn't show up until Chapter 5. I'm loathe to actually jump in without having more feedback.
I've got my list of potential agents together from the AAR website. I need to get to the library, maybe Saturday, to look them up in Jeff Herman's Writer's Guide to Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents as suggested by Susan Page in her book The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book. The founder of my monthly writers' group suggested I ask Rosemary James of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society if she knew anyone. I might run my short list past her and see if she has any caveats about any of them.
We're taking an actual vacation next month to Florida. I want to see a space shuttle launch, and one of the last launches will be in late March. I've booked a good hotel in Titusville and we're driving 11 hours to get there. This is the loopy part to my mind. We're taking the cats. Hubby insists. He doesn't want to leave them for five days in the house by themselves. I've explained we can get someone to come in to feed them and empty the litter boxes. He's convinced that they (meaning his cat because Sonny is too old and sleeps all day) would have the house torn up by the time we got back. Too funny.
My focus group consists of a busy bunch of people. I should have known that the one copy I got back a week later was an anomaly. She reads like I eat potato chips anyway. Crunch away at the tasty goodness and soon the bag is empty. Hubby is reading it too. He's convinced I need to rework the Prologue. I looked at it again and can't see anyplace I could trim without losing integral foreshadowing of plot. I think the first four chapters are pretty solid. I'm going to be adding more interactions with the ghost, who doesn't show up until Chapter 5. I'm loathe to actually jump in without having more feedback.
I've got my list of potential agents together from the AAR website. I need to get to the library, maybe Saturday, to look them up in Jeff Herman's Writer's Guide to Editors, Publishers, and Literary Agents as suggested by Susan Page in her book The Shortest Distance Between You and a Published Book. The founder of my monthly writers' group suggested I ask Rosemary James of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society if she knew anyone. I might run my short list past her and see if she has any caveats about any of them.
We're taking an actual vacation next month to Florida. I want to see a space shuttle launch, and one of the last launches will be in late March. I've booked a good hotel in Titusville and we're driving 11 hours to get there. This is the loopy part to my mind. We're taking the cats. Hubby insists. He doesn't want to leave them for five days in the house by themselves. I've explained we can get someone to come in to feed them and empty the litter boxes. He's convinced that they (meaning his cat because Sonny is too old and sleeps all day) would have the house torn up by the time we got back. Too funny.
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Date: 2010-02-18 07:56 pm (UTC)By the way, I hope you get feeling better. My wife has something nasty. Constant deep, nasty coughing unless she takes cough medicine. I hope your's isn't the same thing.
Oh, and I have stayed away from Twitter. I have no interest at all in that.