Business Musings: Fried Cheese
That’s how I described my brain today to a few folks. Fried cheese. Not Swiss cheese, which would imply that there’s space for air to go through. Fried cheese, all melted together—crusty on the outside and unrecognizable goo on the inside.
Last night, I turned in Women of Futures Past: Classic Stories, right on time. I’m unbelievably stunned I did this.
For those of you who don’t know, this is the first anthology in the various projects I’m doing for Women in Science Fiction. This anthology will be published by Baen in 2016. For some reason, I had thought six months was a reasonable amount of time to put this together. Part of that assumption, I guess, was because I thought I had most of the stories picked out. Then I realized that what I had chosen really didn’t fit with what I was trying to do.
So I read and worked and contacted people and mentally wrote and rewrote the 10K essay that was part of the contract. Then I actually wrote the essay, plus other materials, and revised those, and checked all of my facts, and found out that often Wikipedia was wrong (surprise, right?) and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction was often wrong and Fancyclopedia was mostly right (but limited in its scope for my purposes). Primary Sources R Us for Rusch. Thank heavens we have a large collection of digest from the time period in question, and I had access to other materials.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying that once I downloaded all of this information onto the page, my brain quit. It’s just refusing to work today. (You should’ve seen how long it took to figure out how to spell crusty.) I could power through a major blog, but I’m not going to. I promised myself when I came back to blogging that I would take days like this more or less off.
However, if you’re missing your blog fix, head over to the Coode Street Podcast. Last night, in the middle of compiling everything, I took 90 minutes to talk with Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan about my various projects, including indie publishing, the Retrieval Artist, and the women in science fiction material. We ended up having a long discussion about editing, which I found fascinating. I hope you will too.
See you next week, when (I hope) spelling crusty is easier and my brain actually works again.
“Business Musings: Fried Cheese” copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Image at the top of the blog copyright © Can Stock Photo Inc. / gvictoria
9 responses to “Business Musings: Fried Cheese”
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Kris,
You and Dean gonna be heading up the coast to the Tillamook Cheese Factory for some “squeakers” (cheese curds)? 🙂
Hm… “We set up WMG, hired people […] Now they own it”. I think it was something like this. How did you work that?
Take care.
It’s a corporation, Ferran. 🙂
Kris,
well, yes. I don’t mean the legal part, I mean the personal dynamics of it. Going from owner to, basically, provider / customer. Going from founder to shareowner, I can see (and it already has some dangerous pitfalls). The rest is a tad more complex.
Take care.
PS The “notify when” buttons down there have transparent text in my browser. I can send you captures if you wish
Okay… coming from your other (more recent) post… In this one, you say “now they own it” which, corporation or not, would mean they own the shares, most of them. In other posts, it’s not so clear who owns the shares (or a percentage of the business, or…).
Please do send me the text. I suspect I know where it is. How to fix it is another matter. 🙁 Thank you!
Listened to the pod cast and found it very interesting. Most fascinating to listen to you all talk about writers who I have never heard of. I was never a science fiction reader and I just now have acquired an interest in it since I started writing. I wrote what I believe is space opera novellas this past summer. Great fun. I’ll be looking forward to this project when it comes out.
“That’s how I described my brain today to a few folks. Fried cheese. Not Swiss cheese, which would imply that there’s space for air to go through. Fried cheese, all melted together—crusty on the outside and unrecognizable goo on the inside.”
You do realize you’re making zombification look tasty, yes?
Take care, get well.
If anybody’s earned some downtime, it’s you. Rest up, and I look forward to the next installment.