stop. start. stutter.

For the record, the blue in my hair came out awesome, and was only eclipsed at Disney by the fact that one of the members of our traveling party had neon pink and purple hair. She got more compliments than I did, alas. (Sarah, who is forced by her Day Job to at least pretend to be normal, looked on tolerantly.)

I have returned full of vim and vigor, or at least full of painkillers. (The weather is changing; it plays merry hell with my joints.) Yesterday I did two thousand words on an as-yet-untitled short story for an anthology submission; today, it's final revisions on "Shuffle Up And Deal", which is first-bound, I think, for Asimov's. (Best to start your rejection-letter collection with the big names, right?) Tomorrow it is finishing the anthology short (good Lord willin' and the crick don't rise), and then time to lie on the floor with actual paper notebooks, two kinds of pen, a pencil, and some markers to sketch out the relationships and cultures for Beside Strange Waters.

(The bits I've already written on Strange Waters were the test bits -- to see if I could get the tone and voice and characters to talk to me, and to see if there really was a there there. As there appears to be, and Kaden, the narrative character, is a darling delight and I adore him to bits and pieces and beyond, it is time to put in the work to make sure that I don't suffer from Generic TV Alien Syndrome, where everyone looks like humans in funny makeup and each species only has one culture.)

If I get things arranged to my satisfaction in time, I think I might do Strange Waters for NaNoWriMo this year. I have never found NaNo to be particularly challenging -- high word counts are not a problem for me; it's the persistency necessary to finish something -- but I'm trying to lure Sarah into doing NaNo herself. She keeps eyeing me dubiously. I think she thinks I'm crazy.

No, strike that, she lives with me. She knows I'm crazy.

Vegas was very nice, and I enjoyed it very much! Now we're off to Disney. No, my life is not usually this hectic.

In preparation for a visit to the House of Mouse, of course, I am in the process of doing a touch-up on my hair. See, my hair has not been its Natural and Normal Color since ... probably around 1999 or so, when I switched locations in my Boring Corporate Job and moved away from customer service to tech-geekery, where I would never (praise Jebus) have to come face-to-face with a customer ever again. (Night shift! Server monkey! NOC monkey not crazy, just proud.) My boss at the time, when asked if I was permitted to dye my hair weird colors, blinked at me and said, "Sure. Why not?"

(I think he got some mysterious cachet in the departmental-VP sweepstakes out of it: "my office freak is cooler than your office freak".)

After a few years of attempts, I finally settled on Special Effects hair dye, which comes in an awesome range of colors and which lasts the longest out of any of the "weird color" dyes I've tried; it also doesn't stain as much as the others. (There are several pillowcases that I still have kicking around that look sort of like a tie-dye, and I had a problem for a while in that every time I touched my hair I would then rub off on whatever else I touched. You could tell which side I hit the space bar with, for instance, by the patterns of purple on the keyboard. We do not use that dye anymore.)

For a while I flipped back and forth between Blue Mayhem and Wildflower. Occasionally, when I got bored, I'd bleach it all out and do patchwork-peacock hair (using those two and Fishbowl and Deep Purple and Sonic Green, all the various leftover bits of dye I had and a few that I'd gotten specially for that purpose), and once I did the hair framing my face in Ruby Red and the rest of it in Wildflower. I do not have pictures of many of these, alas.

In the past year or so, I've mostly lacked the energy to wrangle my hair; I bleached it entirely last summer in preparation for dyeing it again, and then never got around to it. So, for a good year or so, I was blonde. Very blonde. The straw-wheat gold blonde you can only get by stripping your hair with peroxide and then not doing anything else to it. It was a very funny look on me, as I am dark-colored like the fine Mediterranean woman I am (yeah, the last name's a bit misleading -- my dad's family is Italian, my mom's family is Irish; I'm using Mom's maiden name as a nom de guerre because it's easier to spell and to remember -- also, the domain name was available). My hair grows fast, so for a little while I had dark roots, and then for a little while longer my hair was pretty much 50/50, and then the last time I got annoyed with it and hacked it all off in the bathroom with scissors, I was left with my natural dark hair with blonde tips.

You know where I'm going with this, I hope.

So a few weeks ago I dragged out the leftover Deep Purple and did the tips. It took very interestingly; it lent my hair a sort of purple shimmer, but it faded really quickly, since the hair wasn't as porous as it would have been if I'd just bleached it.

This time, the experiment is: without re-bleaching the Deep Purple out -- most of it has faded to a sort of steely gunboat grey, which is really interesting but looks accidental instead of deliberate -- I have added Blue Mayhem atop it. I am, therefore, sitting here in my raggedy hair-dyeing t-shirt with a shower cap on my head and a bunch of hair-clips holding the hair underneath it. I can't wait to see how (if) it takes.

A point of pride: after eight years of turning my hair weird colors, I have finally mastered the art sufficiently that there are only specks of dye on my inner forearms, and the only part of the bathroom that is now blue is one tiny spot on the toilet lid. Go me; usually by this point I'd be hauling out the bleach and muttering under my breath the whole time. I can't swear to the fact that all the little flecks of color were what lost me the security deposit in my last rental, but I've got a pretty good sense that it contributed.

One of the downsides to this life: I keep forgetting what day it is. I could have sworn I'd updated this thing, like, yesterday.

Anyway, moving onward! My big news this week is that late last week, a friend of a friend put me in touch with James Mallory, who, along with Mercedes Lackey, is the author of the Obsidian Mountain fantasy trilogy. (Which have been, just for the record, in the rotation for my Airplane Rereading^* books for a while.) Mr. Mallory, you see, found himself in urgent need of a webpage, while (my friend knew) I was in urgent need of Something To Do That Wasn't Staring At This Fucking Book. Cue frantic scrambling, lots of fussy design, emails short back and forth, et voila: MerlinScribe.com. I'm so very proud of it, and Mr. Mallory -- who's been a delight to work with -- is very pleased.

* My criteria for Airplane Rereading: long, plotty, entertaining, comfortable and familiar characters, good storytelling. I read so fast that if I don't want to travel with umpty books, I've got to bring the long ones. The top candidate is, of course, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.

So, you know, if any of you need any web design work done on a shoestring, gimme a holler. I work cheap. And by "cheap", I mean that I can often be persuaded to trade away part of my fee for an advance copy of your next book. *g* (I weaseled an advance of The Phoenix Unchained, first in the next trilogy set in that world, and I am pleased to announce that I think I have found a new Fictional Boyfriend in the main character; he's adorable.)

In other news, and in no particular order:

* Have weaseled a Free Trip to Vegas with a poker-playing friend next weekend, to be the person who reminds him to get the hell out of the poker room and go interact with other adult humans. This comes at an opportune time, as I am putting the final touches on "Shuffle Up And Deal", a short story set at the first World Series of Poker to have an alien playing in the game. It's wacky hijinks about the Old Guard vs. the Young Turks, and it will, Lord willin', be coming soon to a magazine near you.

* A Very Smart Friend may have fixed Sixteen Tons for me, by pointing out what I was subconsciously blocking on. I'm not positive, but I think it might shake things loose. It will, of course, necessitate an entire rewrite of everything I've got up to this point, to the point where I may have to just throw it all out and start over -- but that's okay, as long as I know where it's going. Right? (Right.)

* Despite the fact that I hate writing short stories, I think I may have another one on tap. And you know it's a good one when you have to climb the ladder into your loft library and come down with Augustine's Confessions, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and some Marvin Minsky.

* Someone stole the handicapped hang tag out of our car this weekend. Busted the passenger side window and reached in and took the hangtag. W.T.F, people. I can't even manage to turn that into a story idea; all I can do is fume.