Wednesday,
August 18, 1999

Well, I feel a little better today, enough to go in to work and wrap up some loose ends before we head off to Piteå tomorrow for a two-day departmental meeting. Which is kind of cool, since we usually stay at the Hotel Belona, and the TBS offices there are in the same building so you just wander down when the meeting is about to start. Beside which, the Hotel Belona has these beautiful little rooms with high ceilings and comfty beds -- I always feel like a bit of a princess when I stay there.

The downside is that the meeting, which will include two speakers and assorted talks by our manager, will be in technical Swedish. I'm just not fluent enough in Swedish yet to follow this level of conversation, so I'll be asking my friend Eva for a lot of translation, methinks. But the department has a lot of cool people, and we'll get to gang up on Jörgen Byström and tease him mercilessly (which is only fair, since Jörgen teases me mercilessly, as well. He's a fun guy -- has the best deadpan face in the world, and comes out with these incredible whoppers that always fool you at first because he's looking at you so seriously. If he ever gets tired of being a tech, I think standup comedy would be an excellent second career for him -- that, or politics).

I also want to see if I can really dig in and get some stuff finished, storywise, before I leave for NASFic. I definitely want to get THE MEDIA MUNCHKIN STRIKES BACK completely finished and posted before Monday, and if I can get some work done on the novel that would be stupendous. In any case, I'm going to have the travelling day from Hell on Monday -- fly from Stockholm to Newark, Newark with a technical stop in Phoenix, then Phoenix to San Diego -- so since my butt is going to be nailed to a chair anyway, it seems like a good opportunity to put in a solid chunk of work on WHITE KNIGHT, QUEEN ALICE.

We'll have to see. In any case, wish me luck in Piteå -- they're talking about arranging a surstromming party. Rotten herring -- yum, yum. . .