December 12th 2004
This week has been insufficiently boring.
First, my current freelance writing project requires me to produce 1,500 words per day. This is rather more than I wanted to be writing, but various factors, including both delayed communication from the company I'm working for and other projects that had to be cleared first, meant that I got started rather later than planned. I'm keeping up with that, though, and in fact I'm very slightly ahead of schedule.
Then there's dealing with the Ars Magica Line Editor emails, and sorting out future freelancing work. That's been coming to several dozen emails per day, and I can't clear them instantly. Still, I'm keeping on top of it; there's nothing pending right now.
Finally, I have to actually edit an Ars Magica book: Houses of Hermes: True Lineages. I have the final drafts from the authors, so I just have to get the final edits done by the end of this month. That, unfortunately, isn't on schedule right now. It's still within the realm of the possible, though, so I think I'll manage it. Part of the problem is that I'm only allowed to work four hours per day, according to my visa, which means I can't do massive catch-up at weekends. I think I am actually close to the limit at the moment, too.
Of course, on top of all that, there's school. Homework is not getting done at the moment. Not a big surprise, I don't suppose. I am still getting to all the lessons, which means that my Japanese is still making progress, but I'm not doing very much Japanese outside school at all.
With all this work to do, the class party on Thursday was not ideally timed from my perspective. There wasn't any choice, though, as Shuu, one of my classmates, went back to Taiwan on Friday. In any case, I'm not going to get any less busy before the end of the month, so the party wouldn't have fitted into well whenever it had been held.
That said, it was a very enjoyable party. All the students were there, and everyone made food or brought drinks. (I did chips again.) As usual, Hang's Vietnamese food was absolutely delicious. Most of our core teachers came, as well; the only one missing was Kondo-sensei, who had to be at university instead. So, we ate, drank (varying things), and sat around chatting for several hours. Amazingly enough we had full attendance on Friday morning, too, although a few people seemed a little more fragile than normal.
In other news, Yamasa recently published an interview with me on their website. The interview was actually conducted about six months ago, when Declan thought that he was going to get the next issue out in something rather closer to a fortnight. I would also like to make it perfectly clear that I was far more coherent, articulate, witty, and grammatically correct than Declan's notes suggest. Apart from anything else, I punctuated 'it's' correctly every time I said it. I have a strong suspicion that the notes he took on his laptop at the time were just dumped straight to the web; there are a couple of sentences that make no sense at all. (No, it wasn't my fault!) Still, there's a nice link to the books page on this site, so we'll see if anyone uses it to buy books.