Some evenings I've felt like I'm staring down the barrel of a great big rail gun, and I'm standing in a foot of cold molasses. I can hear the gun warming up. I do have a little time to get the heck out of the way, but it's a hard pull, and if I don't ... whoa, it's gonna smart.
Fortunately, my boss is helping me move a bit more quickly: they're letting me work a compressed, 4-day-a-week schedule. Considering that more often than not I've been coming home too mentally tired to do anything but housework, the extra day should help me meet my long-term deadlines. And I'll be saving an hour outright that normally I'd be spending on the freeway or hunting for a parking space.
My boss will give the situation a review after 90 days; hopefully I can keep my nose clean and turn this into a permanent schedule. He's apparently offered this kind of schedule to other people in the office, but I'm the first who's taken him up on it. I don't mind being a test case. Ideally, at this point I hoped to be working part-time again, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards.
In less cheerful news, Jet-Poop congratulated me on getting an article into a shiny new magazine ... which I quickly realized I'd never heard of before. Curious. I investigated, and discovered the editor found one of my writeups here at E2, liked it, wanted to publish it, and sent me an email asking for permission ... which I never received. And then, when he didn't hear a yea or nay from me, instead of querying me again, he simply decided to run the article. D'oh. Not cool. I gave the editor the benefit of the doubt instead of going ballistic; we'll see if he makes things right. We all screw up sometimes.
In other news, I was asked by the publisher of Apex Books to blurb their new anthology Courting Morpheus. My first blurb! I mustn't gush, even if I really like it.