I am home from my wanderings, but I can’t take too much of a break because I have a deadline rapidly approaching. Eep! I have let myself goof off this morning because I had a very long day of travel yesterday, with my flight taking off at around the time it was supposed to be landing. But after a grocery store run because I desperately need vegetables, it’s going to be back to work.

It was a really good conference, and I’m still processing all the information I gathered. I have story ideas and business ideas. I made a lot of new friends and caught up with old ones. I didn’t see much of California beyond what I could see from my hotel window and the trip to and from the airport, but it rained more than is apparently common, and the flowers were glorious.

There was also an epic viewing party of the Game of Thrones finale — a big screen, big speakers, and a room full of science fiction and fantasy writers. There might also have been alcohol involved (though I had to mostly abstain if I wanted to be awake for the episode).

I must have done okay with my communications stuff because they were talking as though they assumed I’d be doing the same job next year. It seems that a job skill I didn’t know I had was being a good middle manager — getting the information needed from above and getting the work done from below.

It’s good to be home, with my own bed, my usual schedule, and access to nutritious food. Seriously, I need vegetables. When you’re eating in restaurants, it’s hard to find non-salad vegetables. There are salads, and then the “vegetarian plate” tends to involve plant-based proteins, but there aren’t a lot of other vegetables. I reached the point when I was desperately craving carrots.

Once I mentally process all the information I took in, I may have some blog post ideas. But first, I have to finish book revisions.

I had a busy weekend getting all our publication documents ready to go (well, making sure other people got them ready to go), and now I can get back to my own preparations for the Nebula conference this week.

This will be my second trip to Los Angeles, but I didn’t see that much the first time since I was there for less than 24 hours. I went to the Hollywood premiere of Serenity (the Firefly movie), and I wasn’t even there long enough to get a hotel room. I flew in that morning, hung around with friends at their hotel during the day, went to the red carpet, movie, and party, went back to the hotel, changed clothes, and caught the shuttle to the airport, then caught the 6:30 a.m. flight home. I did see a few things along the way, but mostly it was a blur.

I doubt I’ll see much this time other than the trip from airport to hotel and maybe whatever’s around the hotel. But that’s okay because I’m there for the conference.

I will probably be scarce the rest of the week because I’ll be busy either getting ready or traveling. I’m more likely to be tweeting this week than writing blog posts, so you can follow me on Twitter, @ShannaSwendson, for updates.

I’ve been trying to get my massive book collection under some kind of control because I’ve run out of places to put books. For the books I’ve read, I’ve purged down to the ones I know I’ll want to reread. I pulled the books I haven’t read out of the keeper shelf because them being there meant I forgot I had them, which is why I never got around to reading them.

Now I’ve got to deal with the epic to be read stash, which currently takes up part of the small bookcase in my bedroom, plus several boxes. I’ve already done a pretty massive purge, letting go of a lot of the romance novels I got when I was attending romance writing conferences. I had to admit that with all the books there are to read, I was probably never going to read those.

I’m left with a few romance novels by friends that I got when I went to their booksignings, but I may slice the autograph pages out and pass the books on because I’m not actually in touch with most of those friends anymore and they aren’t books I’d have chosen if I hadn’t known the authors. Then I have a small stash of the older traditional Regency romances that aren’t being published anymore. These are the ones that are essentially Georgette Heyer imitations. These work as comfort reads and can be a lot of fun, though I’ve already put one on the donation bag because it was just too sexist for me to tolerate. Most of the stash right now is science fiction and fantasy books from conference goody bags. I really try to sort through those at the conference so I’m only taking books I know I’ll want to read, and that means I’ve got a lot of books I want to read and don’t want to get rid of. I’m hoping that by organizing these books and putting them in the bedroom bookcase where they’re really obvious, I’ll be more likely to pick them up and actually read them.

My main problem with the to-be-read pile is that they keep publishing other things I want to read. My efforts to keep up with what’s currently being published make it harder to dig into the backlog. I’m going to try to get to the books that are handed out this year so they don’t get added to the backlog and so that I’m reading current things. Win-win!

I usually end up reading a book or two during the conference so I don’t have to take those home with me. That may be what I do in the mornings when I wake up well before the conference starts.

I’ve been so busy with rewriting my book and managing communications for the upcoming Nebula conference that I’ve kind of forgotten about getting ready to actually go to the conference. Like, what I should wear. I’ve got room in my closet after a big wardrobe purge, but I don’t really have anything that’s suitable for the occasion and conditions that I haven’t already worn a lot to previous events where I’ll run into the same people. So I think I’m going to take a little time today to see if I can find at least a few new tops.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, part of this conference will be a huge booksigning that’s open to the public. It’ll be the afternoon of Saturday, May 18. All the details are at this site. Come meet all your favorite authors and say hi.

I’m also on a few panels for the conference, in addition to being on the conference staff.

I’m probably not going to manage to be much of a night owl at this event because the time zone is two hours behind me and I’m not good for late nights even at home. I’ll be falling asleep around 9 in the evening. I’m not sure I’ll even make it to the awards ceremony (since I’m not presenting this year). It doesn’t start until 8, which is 10 to my body, and I’m usually sound asleep by 10:30 or 11. I’ve been trying to shift myself a little later this week, but I don’t know how well that’s working.

So, off to pick up my travel necessities and see if I can find a shirt or two that will go with skirts and slacks I already have.

For the past couple of nights, my exercise time viewing was a program I recorded last week about screen time. I was feeling a bit smug because I’m not one of those people who’s addicted to their phones. They were saying that people unlock their phones an average of 80 times a day, and I can go days without looking at my phone. I think I use it as a music player more than anything else. I don’t have notifications set for anything but texts or phone calls, and even then I mostly keep my phone on silent since I get so many fake calls every day that having a ringer on would be disruptive.

But if I’m being honest with myself, my screen of choice is my laptop. I don’t look at my phone very much, and the only time I do any kind of social media on my phone is when I’m traveling, but when I’m at home, I probably spend more time on screens than I should. It’s difficult to quantify, since my work involves being on my computer, and social media is to some extent part of my work. But I also recognize that it’s become something of a boredom crutch. The moment I’m not engaged in doing something else, my impulse is to check social media or otherwise goof around online.

On the program, they were talking about how sites like Facebook and Twitter are built around not giving you a logical stopping point. No matter how much you scroll, you’re going to run across something you haven’t seen before since they throw in posts that people you follow have liked or re-posted. That keeps you scrolling and scrolling for fear of missing out on something. I think that explains a lot. Back in the heyday of blogs, people posted once a day, so even though the posts were long, I spent a lot less time online reading them. The feed, whether using a feed reader or something like the LiveJournal friends list, was in chronological order and stayed that way, so you could easily find the first thing you hadn’t read, catch up on what was new, and then stop knowing you’d seen it all. If there was a discussion going on in comments, you could opt to get notifications about new comments without having to go back constantly. Going back a bit further into the days of Usenet, you could set your news reader to only show you new posts. Again, you could get through the new stuff you cared to see in a short amount of time and then move on.

But Twitter and Facebook seem totally opposed to just giving a chronological feed of the things you’ve said you want to see. They throw in things the people you follow like or comment on, and I think they withhold some posts to show up later if you check often. It’s all a jumble. And it does seem like this is why. They don’t want you to ever realize you’ve come to a stopping point.

I’m trying to be a lot more mindful about this and limit my impulse to just check online when I have a down moment. Yesterday, when I was taking a revision break between chapters, I started to automatically check Twitter and instead practiced my choir music, stepping away from the computer. That’s another reason I need to get my office in order. I want to go back to keeping my computer upstairs so that it takes more effort to go check it. I’ve tried trimming my lists to see only things I really enjoy seeing, which has helped some. I still think I’d be shocked if someone timed the amount of time I spend, the way they did in that program. The teenagers in one family were spending 12 or more hours a day on their phones. They were finding that schools that made students lock up their phones during the school day saw an increase in test scores and a decrease in behavior issues like bullying. And people who take a lot of selfies tend to feel worse about their appearance and more critical of themselves.

I’m guessing this is going to be a whole new area of psychological research in the coming years.

We’re supposed to get nasty storms this afternoon, so this morning was my rush around doing errands before it starts storming time. Now I have groceries, medication and other supplies, and have filled up my car, so let it rain! (But preferably not hail.)

I think I’m making progress on my revisions. I got four chapters done yesterday and figured out a big shift I could make to make things flow better. Today may be slower since I’ve hit a part that needs more substantial rewriting. I’m actually kind of enjoying this because it’s making the book closer to the vision I had when I came up with the idea. I seem to have been in a slump when I was writing it because it mostly seems a bit flat. I’m adding a lot of emotion and oomph to it.

Meanwhile, I’ve come up with yet another idea. I was afraid I was going to have nightmares after the very intense thing that was on TV Sunday night, but instead I dreamed a new book that had nothing to do with that intense thing and maybe owed more to the PBS Les Miserables, which I didn’t watch until Monday night. It’s in a category people have asked me about writing but that I haven’t had an idea for, and now I have an idea. As usual, when I wrote down what I know, I had about two paragraphs (though if I dramatized it, I might have been able to write about five pages), but I’ve got a title, a main character, a rough sense of the situation and world, the inciting incident and opening scene, and a general sense of the core of the plot, plus a scene later in the book. And it all still made a lot of sense when I wrote it down. It wasn’t just a wacky dream of an idea that made no sense in the light of day.

I know it’s nowhere near ready to write because it’s not distracting me from my revisions, like a lot of shiny new ideas do. There will be research required, and I think maybe even a trip.

But first, I have to deal with the things currently on my plate.

This is the first day this week when I don’t have anywhere to go and have no appointments. I have plenty to do, but I don’t have to do it on a particular schedule. And it finally stopped raining (for a few days) — wouldn’t you know, on the day when I don’t have to drive anywhere after spending the week driving in the rain.

One thing I’m not doing is going to the Avengers movie or avoiding spoilers about it. It’s not that I’m boycotting or against it, or anything like that. This isn’t one of those smug “I’m too cool to be into this thing that everyone else is excited about” things, though I will confess to some superhero fatigue/resistance. I’m just so far behind on movies that there’s no way I could watch all the movies (I think I saw that there are something like 22) I’d need to see to build up to it. I saw the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie and I saw the first Captain America movie on TV when I was watching Agent Carter and wanted the backstory (and I really wish they’d done more in the WWII era before moving it to the present), and I’ve seen past Spider-Man movies, though not the ones that fit into the current storyline. But I’m clueless about all the rest of the stuff involved.

When these movies first started coming out (with Iron Man, I think?), I didn’t bother because I’ve never been a big comic book reader and was entirely unaware of the character. And from there it started mushrooming, but by then I was so far behind and didn’t have the background on most of this stuff to jump in. Now it’s taking over everything — my pastor even referred to the upcoming movie in his Easter sermon — and I feel so behind.

So, maybe when that Disney streaming service gets launched and it has all the Marvel movies, I can finally get caught up and see them all in story chronological order and I’ll get what everyone’s talking about. But with more than 20 movies, at my current rate of getting around to watching movies, it’ll take me half a year to get through them all, and that’s if that’s all I watch.

Meanwhile, I’m watching all my friends freaking out and getting excited and feeling rather out of it. Fortunately, I’ve absorbed enough info about all this from my friends that I actually understand my pastor’s sermons when he makes Avengers references.

I spent much of yesterday doing a scene-by-scene outline of the book so I could remind myself of what I’d written. I can already see things I want to fix before I even start digging into my editor’s suggestions. I think most of this work is going to be fine-tuning and amping up some aspects. I’m still not sure how extensive it really will be.

Strangely, this process has made me feel better about the book I was working on because I’d just gone through this process with the parts I’d written of that book, and when I analyzed those scenes, there was so much more going on. I have scenes in this book that have very little purpose or that have the same purpose as several other scenes, so I either need to add stuff or combine scenes.

Meanwhile, tonight is my last real session of children’s choir. The kids sing Sunday, and then there’s a program next Wednesday night, but this is the last time I have to have any kind of plans. I’m not sure how many kids I’ll end up with because it’s a rainy day. Sometimes that means they’ve been cooped up all day and the parents want them out of the house, so we have a big group. Sometimes that means no one wants to go out in the bad weather, and we have a small group. Last week, there was a threat of severe storms (that didn’t actually happen) and I had two kids. So I guess I’ll wing it. But it will be nice having that one responsibility off my shoulders.

Which is good because I’ve got a lot of other responsibilities right now. So, off to work!

It turns out that it’s a good thing I was in a regrouping mode on this book because I just got revision notes on my book for Audible, and I’ve got about a month to get those rewrites done. That’s going to require some abrupt gear shifting. At least I’m not interrupting any serious momentum. I’m going to have to reread the book because it’s been so long since I worked on it that I don’t even remember much about it. Which is good, in a way, because it means I’m not stuck on whatever I wrote before, so it’ll be easier to change it.

And doing these revisions may give me ideas for what I can do with other books. Every time I work with an editor, I learn something new that makes my writing better overall. I’m a bit weird in that I like revisions because I like feeling like I’m making the book better.

But this does mean I’ll be very busy for the next few weeks. I want to get the revisions done before I go to the Nebula weekend so I can then give it another pass and proofread afterward.

Now to go reread my book so I can remember it.

I made it through Easter weekend. I don’t have a lot of voice left, but I get a break this week because the choir isn’t singing Sunday. My children’s choir is, so I still have to deal with it, but I don’t have to use my voice (other than for scolding naughty kids). I’ve also already done the post-Easter Target chocolate run, and I seem to have been over-eager about that because the discount wasn’t yet in the system and the cashier had to do it manually.

Now for the rest of the day I need to settle in and get caught up on things. The to-do list is getting intimidating.

I’m still working out what the rest of this book needs to be, finding plot reasons for the “wouldn’t it be cool if …” scenes, working the new characters who’ve come up during writing into the already planned scenes. I think part of my problem is that my original plan didn’t actually have any conflict through most of the story, until we got near the end and found out what was really going on. I need to find a way to bring some of that conflict forward. That’s really tricky because I was kind of enjoying just going along and discovering things. I like low-conflict stories. Unfortunately, you can’t really sell those. I need to find a middle ground between “just enjoying this interesting place and these people” and “everyone is in mortal peril and the fate of the entire world is at stake.”

I actually had to put a book I was reading this weekend down because it was too much for me. The characters kept doing dumb things, sometimes for good reasons, and sometimes for Reasons (because the author needed it for the plot to work), and I just couldn’t take it. It didn’t help that a lot of the dumb things involved gambling, and for some reason, that’s a real hot button for me. I can’t deal with stories about gambling. I’m not sure why. I guess I just think it’s a huge waste of money. Gamblers enjoy it because they feel like they’re going to win and come out ahead, but I see it as you’re most likely to lose it all, so it’s not fun, and it’s stressful to read about. The book description did mention gambling, but I thought it was mostly the setup, and it turned out to be the core of the story.

Meanwhile, I suspect there will be a lot of stress knitting going on during next week’s Game of Thrones episode. I almost can’t bear to watch. I wonder if maybe I should wait and read spoilers and then watch so I can brace myself.

So, yeah, I need to moderate my risk aversion in order to get a good story, even if I don’t have to take it quite that far.