Check, Check, Check

* Call my friend back - check.

* Post in LiveJournal about John Scalzi's link to that list of tips for writers - check.

* Post Father Smith's "temptation" sermon, complete with public domain illustrations tracked down using Google - check.

* Find Harlan Ellison's address - check.

* Spend an hour writing and revising the cover letter to Harlan, and a further hour experimenting with PhotoStudio 2000 to print out halfway decent copies of the "Harlan's Hat" photos - check.

* Comment on Carly's latest posting - check.

*  Write my Musings entry for tonight... what, now?  It's 12:40 AM! (So?  Since when has that stopped me?)

All this, plus Enterprise, dinner with John at the local Chinese restaurant, and the lack of a really good idea for a topic tonight leaves me yawning and scrambling for something to say at this moment.

The phone calls with my friend would be the most interesting posting fodder of the lot, if I wanted to violate her privacy in a major way.  This friend, who has a couple of disabilities that will go unspecified here, has decided to go back to school to study CSI stuff.  She's really into it, not just the fictional shows but the nonfiction ones on A&E and elsewhere, plus Court TV.  I suspect her counselor will take a dim view of all this, assuming that my friend won't stick with the program or be able to physically handle a job in that field.  Myself, I wouldn't care to bet against her.

I like the writing tips.  I may actually pay some attention to them in my final Heirs edit.

After a while, it gets boring to post sermon after sermon with the same standard pictures of the priests who wrote them.  So I tracked down two old pieces of art relating to the temptation of Jesus in the desert.  It got me thinking about conventions in religious art over the centuries, from the medieval lack of perspective to visible halos to the Irish Jesus who invites kids to Vacation Bible School each summer.  Neither piece of public domain art I found to go with the sermon really does it for me.  One is too fine in its black and white subtlety, and makes Satan look like a gargoyle.  The other makes Jesus much taller than the buildings the devil is showing him.  Ah, well.  At least it breaks up the page a bit.  If I could draw well, I would do something more naturalistic.

Harlan's address turned up in a location I considered pretty much a sure thing: my white notebook of autographed letters and photos and other artifacts.  It's not the 1975 letter I've been looking for since 2002 or so, but the follow-up, responding to my request for permission to reprint his previous letter in 2-5YM, the Star Trek zine I edited in those days.  The notebook itself failed to turn up when I looked for it a couple of times over the past week, but it turned up tonight in a different bookcase.

The cover letter is on a neat template I designed for letters to agents and publishers, with the Mâvarin logo at the top and "Welcome to Mâvarin" at the bottom, just above my contact information.  I'm ashamed to say that the template has not yet been put to its intended use.  Not even once.

Printing from PhotoStudio required a bit of experimentation, and the results were disappointing.

I want more apple-pear scented bubble bath.

That's all for this entry--except for one last item on my checklist:

*  Remind my writerly friends to answer my poll - check.

Karen