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A Busy Weekend

25/5/2015

2 Comments

 
Good morning, Readers!
Picture
Equestrian Archery season is upon us again! I'm so excited! Image courtesy of historyonhorseback.com. Click for link.
So, it was a pretty busy Saturday, this weekend!

The Amazing Flatmate had her birthday party Saturday night.  She organised the whole thing.  I'm feeling a bit of guilt about that, as I had wanted to organise something wonderful for her.  Alas, her work schedule meant that she couldn't really give me a time when she'd be free.  That makes for tricky organising, I tell you.  Ahhh...the life of a free-lancer in the film industry.

In any case, it meant that she organised it all herself.  There was still a tonne of work that needed doing, of course, and as amazing as she is, she couldn't do it all herself, so I spent all Saturday pretty much in the kitchen.  I needed a long nap afterwards, though it seems like I can't do anything without needing a long nap afterwards, these days.

(See also: symptoms of depression)

It was totally worth it.

What a fantastic night!  There were people!  Laughter!  Food!  Scotch (Thanks, Tom)!  So many people, so many good friends gathered in one place... You all make me feel better about the state of my species.  Thank you all so much for coming and for making Saturday night as wonderful as it was.  Between the two of us, the Amazing Flatmate and I know incredible people.

Of course, it was all very overwhelming and I required pretty much all of yesterday to recover.  I feel guilty.  I should have been tidying the kitchen yesterday, but I was just so bone weary.  I spent most of yesterday in bed, recovering.  In my defence, I crawled into bed well past my bed time Saturday night (actually, Sunday morning), and I was "on" for the whole night as I tried to be a good hostess and make sure everyone had something to drink and eat, and to talk to everyone who came.  I didn't quite manage to get around to everyone, I think, but I tried!

I should have been waiting on the birthday girl, who was also flitting around trying to be a good hostess and talk to everyone and make sure everyone had food and drink.  She forgot to feed herself in the process.  Do me a favour?  If you see her today, hand her a piece of fruit or something...

Still, it was a fantastic night, and I'm so glad everyone came.  I'm so happy it went well!

In the world of writing, I have almost finished transcribing Sky Road Walker from second person to first person.  It should hopefully be finished by this week.  Once that's done, I need to go through and divide the text into chapters and then start the real editing.  If I'm really lucky, I should have the book out to the first Beta Reader by the end of June.  If I'm really lucky.

I was worried that the book would be too long for the standard paperback format, but it's looking like it will be fine.  If it does prove to be too long by the end of it, I'll just make the paperbacks slightly larger than I already do.  It should all fit into one volume that way.  I have no idea when it might be released as of yet.  At this rate, it's looking like early next year.

As for Human, it's almost complete.  The formatting should be finished sometime this week.  Once I have the formatted file, I can upload it and order the physical proof.  I'm so excited to hold this book in my hand.  It's like I'm publishing for the first time all over again!  I'm fairly certain that there are few errors in this book... but I say that about every book.  This is why I find it hugely important to get the physical copy of a book.  I find it far easier to find errors in a physical copy than I can staring at a computer screen.

Once that's done, I just have to wait for the cover!  Yay!

I was thinking of handing out some A.R.C.s to people who might want to review the book.  I'm not sure where to start with that, as this is the first time I've done the advanced reading copy thing.  Does anyone know of any book bloggers or newspaper/magazine folk that might be open to reviewing the book?  I think I will be spending the majority of today l researching that.

Life news is rather plain.  There is some excitement, though!  I've been in contact with my equestrian archery trainer and will hopefully be out in the field to train soon.  I'm excited about that.

Lastly, I wanted to touch on Thursday's blog post (THIS one, in case you haven't read it yet).  Yesterday, in between resting and napping, I logged onto YouTube to catch up on my subscriptions.  I'm subscribed to a number of people on YouTube.  Most of them are my age or older.  A couple are young.  The Third Pew falls into this category.  He's young.  Very young.  He's also entertaining, funny and incredibly insightful.

This weekend, he uploaded this is the video:
In it he talks about the responsibility YouTubers have (do they have one?) to educate as well as entertain.  He talks about the same struggle I talked about on Thursday, except for him the struggle was not about accepting and learning to love his femininity (he's a dude.  Not that I know anything about his inner life, but I'm reasonably sure that struggle isn't really something he knows), it was about learning to accept and love his blackness.

He talks about previously rejecting his culture and language, wishing his skin was lighter and so on.

It broke my heart a little bit, mostly because he seems like such an awesome human being.

He also talked about representation, and the distinct lack of black representation in his particular community.  This is important.  It needs to be addressed.  It sucks that, at just eighteen years old, he has to consider his part in the presentation of black youth so deeply.  He should be able to be a normal kid doing normal silly kid stuff on YouTube.  You know, like white kids can.

I do hope that Nathan continues to vlog.  I think more black youth need to see black youth being their normal, intelligent selves instead of being assaulted by the horrifically skewed images of themselves as presented by the traditional media.

Representation matters.

And on that note, I'll leave you all to go practice Welsh!

Ciao!
2 Comments
Eric link
25/5/2015 04:41:31 am

It really was a great party.

Check your email for a surprise.

Reply
S.M. Carrière link
25/5/2015 05:19:29 am

SQUEE! Thanks so much!

Reply



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    S.M. Carrière, a Celtic Studies enthusiast, writes fiction.  And this blog.

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