Sunday,
April 27, 2008

Talk about a busy weekend

I went into my new agency's office to sign paperwork and set up direct deposit for my paycheck, then had to go to two LabCorp offices to pee in a cup (the first one was at Medical Center of Plano and they don't do drug screens anymore, just blood pulls).

Which brings up something that may be TMI for folks, but here it is anyway -- due to the structure of the delivery system, women can't aim all that well when it comes to filling a urine sample cup. With this in mind, having a sink IN the bathroom for cleanup duty would be nice.

And yes, I've heard about some people using clean powdered urine to avoid showing up as a drug user -- that's why the lab tech is supposed to test the temperature of the urine. I don't mind if there's only a cold water faucet -- I just want to be able to wash my hands, thank you very much.

And then on Saturday

I sat in on the IRC reports from the Nebulas -- congratulations to all the winners!

Novel: The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
Novella: "Fountain of Age" by Nancy Kress
Novelette: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang
Short Story: "Always" by Karen Joy Fowler
Script: "Pan's Labyrinth" by Guillermo Del Toro

And from reports the jacket I made for Lee went over like gangbusters, so I'm sitting here with a big ol' grin on my face. I rule with a needle!

Immediately after that, I recorded the first episode of my very own podcast. Well, this is what happens when you hang out with podcasters -- at first you just listen, and then they they draw you in and you call in to a couple of shows' voicemail lines, and then you participate in group shows, and the next thing you know you're getting an account on LibSyn and creating artwork for your blog site. Now I just have to wait for iTunes to approve it, and people can download straight from there -- huzzah!

In the meantime, you can listen to us here -- http://www.dqydjpodcast.blogspot.com

The description is, "Melanie Fletcher and Jerry J. Davis are science fiction writers who are happy to chat about pretty much anything, especially if you offer them free books, coffee or beer." And for our inaugural episode, we gabbed on about Iron Man, tequila, why most writers need a day job (hence the name of the podcast) and Jerry completely confused me about a punctuation mark called an interrobang. Fun stuff. In future episodes we're going to have a segment called "Secrets of the Industry" where we skewer myths about writing, and we definitely need to have some guests on real soon.

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