My sister Nancy is here for a visit with her husband and children. It makes me glad. She lives so far away that we don’t get to see each other much. We still keep in touch via the internet, but that is different than being together and having random conversations sparked by a stray comment. These free-form conversations frequently lead us interesting places, or to places where one of us passes along information that the other finds very useful, but that would never have occurred to us to mention in a blog entry or email. Someday I’m going to go visit in Germany instead of always waiting for them to come here.
I’ve now gotten the delivery schedule from our printer. We’ll receive delivery of Scrapyard at the end of May. This means we’ll be doing our book release party at Conduit and doing the shipping events early in June. It is good to have a schedule.
All four of the Schlock books have been submitted to Baen. Now it is up to their technical wizards to figure out if/how to format these books for electronic distribution. I’m really glad to have this out of my hands and I hope that it doesn’t come back to me.
It feels really good to be back into a maintenance state rather than a pushing-to-finish state. I get to relax and vacation for the next week and then I need to dive in to Resident Mad Scientist. I’ll also use the quiet space before opening pre-orders to do some work on some of my own projects. Once we open pre-orders I’ll have shipping preparation to do.
Parent Teacher Conferences were last night. These were much nicer than the ones I had last Fall. Last Fall there was a lot of puzzlement about how to help struggling kids. The plans we made then have worked well, because this time all of the teachers and I got to smile at each other and agree that things are going well. It was a nice change. I was particularly pleased with Patch’s kindergarten teacher. She demonstrated to me that she really understands Patch and likes him. Since she’s the one teacher I haven’t had the the time to get to know well, I was really glad to see it. I was pretty sure this was the case, which is why I spent my energies helping out in Link and Gleek’s classrooms. Family stuff needs a larger share of my time in the next couple of months.
The weather is warming up. There will be gardening soon.