Woke up three hours early, couldn't get back to sleep, churned through another 150 e-mails. It goes faster when you get to the older stuff, since so much of it is just out of date and no longer relevant. Backlog is down to 335. Happy to have been productive, sad there's still so many left. Also sad because I know I'm going to feel the lack of sleep later today. Boo.

Time to prep for classes and student meetings.

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I am so behind. I feel compelled to list what I actually got accomplished today, forgive me. I'm hoping it will make me feel better.

• supervising guys pruning our trees -- this was sort of a pain, in multiple ways, but the end result will be that a) the power line running diagonally across our back yard will now run along the fence instead, which will at least LOOK less hazardous, and b) we should have notably more sun in the front yard, which will be good for flowers in a few months; fingers crossed

• many hours of e-mail backlog processing resulting in about 80+ messages handled. 513 to go. At this rate, if I dedicate one solid week of full-time work to e-mail, I might actually get through it all. Hell.

• talked to a cleaning lady (I don't like that term, it doesn't sound right, but I can't think of anything better -- 'cleaning person' sounds goofy, and 'woman with her own house-cleaning business' is long and cumbersome, help) and she is coming on Saturday, and then once a month thereafter, and I am SO glad that the budget has loosened up enough to allow for her help because if you could see the state of my stovetop, you would probably have a heart attack. Also, the dustbunnies under our bed are procreating wildly.

• did the first stage of reorganizing our closet so that we can better assess how much closet space we're still short of, and what size dresser(s) we need to squeeze into our bedroom -- the project is not done, but significant progress was made

• cooked dinner and fed the family

• played some with the cute and happy children

So all of that was good, really. I worked from morning 'til night and I accomplished a hell of a lot, actually. But the problem is that what I didn't do was write, and that lack is making me crazy. And I could write now, because I'm wide awake, but I -- no, screw that. It's just an excuse, a list of excuses, that I'm in bed already and I can't type much more in this position, and it's cold out of the bed and I'd have to put on clothes, and I have to get up at 6 and do class prep before the kids get up so I can teach, so I should go to bed now in order to get eight hours sleep -- I mean, that's all true, but if I'm writing all this and I'm wide awake, clearly the solution is to get up and wrap myself in warm clothes and write fiction for an hour or two, and then I will be happy when I go to sleep, and if I only sleep six or seven hours instead of eight, it is not going to kill me.

Okay then.

11:30 update: I went and did writing. Revising, actually, but productive revising, and I think I figured out what I want to happen with my half-drafted story (#7 in Demimonde, "Old Friends Meet"), so when I get to write again (I can maybe squeeze out an hour tomorrow afternoon, if I'm not too exhausted), I'll know where to take it. Good progress. So much happier. Also sleepy. G'night!

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I meant to post this earlier, but it's not too late! Clarion West was amazingly influential to me as a writer (and super-fun), and I loved teaching at Clarion at UCSD. Highly recommended.

"The application period for the 2012 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop at UC San Diego officially opened on December 1, and will remain open until March 1. If you've been thinking about applying, start tapping on those keys now. We've got a wonderful faculty waiting in the wings, featuring Jeffrey Ford, Marjorie Liu, Ted Chiang, Walter Jon Williams, Holly Black, and Cassandra Clare. Thanks to Clarion's friends and supporters, there is scholarship money for those who need it. In addition to general scholarships, there are special grants for students of color, students who are affiliated with Michigan State University, and students who are affiliated with UCSD. Get further information on the web at http://clarion.ucsd.edu"

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So you know how I was worried that we would get a piano, and then we wouldn't play it? No need to worry, as it turned out. I'm finding myself drawn to it regularly -- I play for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time, usually, a few times a day. If I had practiced this much as a kid, my piano teacher would have been SO happy -- sorry, Mr. Valenti! As a teacher now, I admit, I'm wincing at how much of your time I wasted...

I wasn't sure what I'd want to play, so I got an assortment of classical music, and then a few 'fake' books. If you're not familiar with them, fake books have both the regular music, but also the melody line with guitar chords, which makes it much easier to sight-read the music quickly. It means that I can pick up a Simon and Garfunkel tune, or a song from Camelot, (the two fake books I have so far) and pretty much play it and sing along without practicing. I sort of thought that's what I'd be doing a lot, but it hasn't turned out that way. Instead, I've been playing classical music, and specifically, Bach.

Now, I didn't love Bach when I was a kid, studying classical music every week. I liked a lot more drama in my music -- my favorite was Rachmaninoff, if I'm remembering right. For my last performance, I did a piece of his, twenty pages of big crashing chords, flinging my hands up and down the piano, crazy trills -- playing that piece was like playing a thunder-and-lightning storm, and it was FUN! Bach is like the opposite of that.

And while I didn't think I could just fling myself into Rachmaninoff again after twenty-five years away, I did try a Chopin nocturne when I first sat down. And yes, it is awfully pretty, but dude. That isn't easy. Five flats to start out with, and all kinds of complexity. There might have been a time in my life when I could have played it smoothly, but that time isn't now, and trying to play it was just stressing me out. Which was NOT the goal in actually getting the piano.

But then I picked up the Bach book. It's the Schirmer Library (oh, those yellow books, I remember thee well) First Lessons in Bach, and it is surprisingly perfect. For one thing, Bach sounds great on the spinet we bought -- perfectly apropos to the instrument. But more importantly, these little songs are just my speed. Little studies in rhythm, in fingering, in tone and more -- each one designed specifically to help you work on some aspect of piano technique, but at the same time, each one a charming little tune, soothing and satisfying to play.

It's surprisingly meditative, playing these little minuets. And at this point in my life, discipline and quiet are apparently exactly what I need. They are balm to my stressed-out soul. I'm not the teenager longing for drama in my life; I don't need Rachmaninoff right now. At forty, a little Bach a few times a day is a prescription for a calmer, happier me. I had no idea!

I'm off to practice now. Thanks again, Mr. Valenti! I may have wasted some of your time, but now, finally, I can try to make sure those childhood lessons didn't entirely go to waste. I'm never going to be a concert pianist, but playing music is bringing joy to my life. Which was pretty much the point all along.

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For today's blog class, I had the students read John Scalzi's "Being Poor", along with a good chunk of the comments on that entry. We talked about:

• the politics of the piece
• how John crafted the piece stylistically
• the impact of the ending
• how it related to the Katrina media coverage of the time (what it did, that traditional media didn't or couldn't)
• the fact that this piece was picked up by various newspapers (wider coverage)
• the link to Nick Mamatas's response, and the separate conversation in his blog about relative and absolute poverty
• the way John handled trolls, derailment, and confusion in the comments
• the way his community of readers did the same

There are a couple of excellent examples in the comments to that piece of how one can effectively moderate a comments thread (I particularly liked John's response to Mike Cane at 4:02, and Mike's response back at 4:12), which leads in nicely to a discussion of the role of blogs and their communities in politics, and in our society generally. It was a really effective piece to use, for what I'm trying to teach them right now -- to get a sense of how blogs can function as both art and cultural influence.

They liked the piece and its comments, I think. It's hard not to respond to it. Especially when you read lines like this one:

"Being poor is trying to decide which one of you gets to eat today – the one of you that is pregnant or the one of you that can work." -- Anna, in comments

Gods.

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