Eccentric Flower:199908/Neutral face

First off, thanks to everyone who sent nice comments about the photos and the eyebrows and such. For once I am not sending replies to these messages - apologies for the rudeness but I don't really have any reply there except "Thank you!" So, if you sent me one of those: Thank you.

I am not frowning or sad in those photos, by the by. I'm not even particularly intent. That is the normal, neutral expression my face makes all by itself. Now you know why people don't see me as an especially cheery sort. But I also don't smile in photos - I dislike the way I look when I smile, particularly if it's not a smile that has a genuine cause.

Oh, and they're hammers, not crosses.

Today I got to work and found that once again my competence was being (I felt) impugned. While I am not the most driven worker in the universe - I have approximately zero work ethic for any project that's not my own - I do get the job done, and I do some things quite well. But I am continually facing what I perceive as bad press, mostly because I didn't go to school at The Institvte and therefore haven't had an extra four to six years to learn where all the bodies were buried. We use a lot of peculiar homegrown systems here, and I haven't mastered them all, even after more than a year - but I think it's rather unreasonable for anyone to have expected me to.

Anyway, I got into that productive kind of angry and proceeded to finish up four or five loose projects that people have been pestering me about. There. That'll get 'em off my back for a while.

Then I had margaritas and Tex-Mex food with Nonelvis and Jag. A mistake - I got queasy and gassy by the time we made it home, and had to lie down for a while. When I woke up, Nonelvis was watching the Food Network. We seem to be watching more and more of this, what with Iron Chef and our Sara Moulton fetish. And Emeril - okay, a word or two about Emeril here.

Emeril Lagasse (which he pronounces "la-gassy," not "lagoss" like a good Cajun would) is a fake - in the sense that he got famous on Louisiana food, but is from Fall River, Massachusetts (where, lest we forget, Lizzie Borden took an axe and was eventually acquitted due to insufficient evidence.)

On the other hand, I cannot deny Emeril is fun to watch. He's got this charm like a bad little kid who is secretly delighted to be caught misbehaving. He works like someone who knows his business. He's got the moves, in other words. And tonight he was making Vietnamese food and actually seemed to be doing it right - so he at least bothers to research what he's doing.

As long as he doesn't call himself a Cajun, he can stay on my good side. But watch out, buster.

Later, we went to the grocery store and I came back and checked my mail. Another set of comments on the Aedie novel had arrived ... and now I am really very unhappy. (No offense to you, Cat, the comments were excellent.)

First Ysabel and Samantha read it and they loved it. Sure, there were problems, but the reaction was positive. Then Mary Anne read it and hers were the comments which first led me to realize I'd have more rewriting to do than I thought. Patrick read it and that was the first time I wasn't left with the impression the reader liked the book overall. Then Rose read it - and Rose didn't like the book. Actually, what was disturbing is that both Rose and Patrick implied that I'd given them a glimpse of other stories - alternate-universe versions of these events - that they felt they would have enjoyed reading better. In their own way, they were both saying: Show me that book! Why are you wasting my time with this one?

Then Cat checked in, and some of the things she complained about were completely different from the things everyone else has complained about - which are, by and large, all different from one another as well.

If everyone agreed on which aspects of the book sucked, it would be correctable. But it's obvious now that no two people are going to agree on that, which leaves me in the position of deciding who to please and who not to please.

I hate this. All I want to do is make the book more enjoyable. But I don't want to have to write a completely different book in order to do it. The corollary of that is, for some people, I will not be able to make this book enjoyable at all.

I will take one more set of comments on this book - from Eric, whom I expect to hate it ... and possibly from Mary Anne if I ever get off my rear and send her the printed copy I promised her.

Then I have to decide whether I can salvage this at all. Well, at least I had a lot of fun writing it. Thanks again to everyone who put in the time and the effort, whether it works out or not.

Meanwhile, I am gearing up for my train ride on Saturday and trying very hard to not think about this at all. If I seem gloomy at the gathering, it's not just because my neutral expression is an unhappy one.