Nobody, darnit

I think I might have forgotten to mention I sold a story to Lightspeed. Oops. When it happened, I was at the Real Life equivalent of Livejournal, the Rainforest Writers Retreat, and was able to jump up and down with stupid glee and tell a huge percentage of my friends right there. I was also thinking I should wait to announce it until I had my counter-signed contract, which, as a friend pointed out, is silly.

I can't even describe how happy this makes me. I think Lightspeed is one of the best sf publications out there, and they were the second place I sent this story to. This is the story I wrote for my Clarion application, with which I wanted to impress Samuel Delany. I took some advice from Delany and shamelessly smeared my heart around on the page. (And also thought up one of the strangest sexual/romantic arrangements I could.) I didn't get into Clarion, but Lightspeed's even better.

Anyway, I've been struggling with the technical aspects of getting my edits*. It's all worked out now. But for future reference: if you want to view an editor's comments in Open Office, you need to have a .doc, not a .rtf.

*which otherwise have been painless. I suspect I'm a better person now for having had half my M-dashes mercilessly incinerated.

So I've looked at Twitter like twice since signing on. Is there a way to view updates so that I'm not having to read conversation sequences backwards?

Yesterday, I called pussinboots saying, "can we have the writing meeting at my work?"

Behind the cut is a dongle.
( dongle )

A dongle is a little doodad which you plug into a computer and it lets you run a piece of software. In my work's case, a program which arranges files so we can plate them and print them.

No dongle, no plates, no printing. This is bad for a printing press.

Sunday night, my co-worker, who was rushing to get as much work done as possible before he left to play in Disneyworld for a week, discovered the dongle stopped working.

Monday, I spent a couple hours on hold with Kodak finding out WTF to do. They say they'll send us a new one. We're number one priority. Fine.

Long story short, what was supposed to be an overnight delivery didn't happen, and we were jerked around by Kodak for three long days without plates. I tried to manually lay out the plates, but that was a very slow, painful joke. Someone had to stay late last night to await the courier coming down from Canada with the dongle. (The warehouse is just across the border. Our production manager said, "we'll just drive up there and pick the dang thing up." The lady he was talking to was all, "uhh..." So rather than have us busting their door down, they sprung for the courier.) The guy showed up quickly. Turns out we didn't have to have the meeting at work, to my disappointment. :-)

One day left in the week, and then my co-worker will be back. Ugh. I respect that guy, he's the one who usually has to deal with this crap. But lucky for me, we've got a new girl who knows what she's doing and is doing the job I usually do, while I wrestle with Kodak and programs I don't really know how to use.

So screw you, Kodak, and screw you, dongle.

Did I mention that today, in the mail, we got another dongle, identical to the one I'm holding, which acts in the same, non-functioning way as the original (visible in above image).

Screw you.