Friday, May 25, 2001

The company as a whole hit a bunch of milestones this morning, so we were all allowed to go home early. I went straight to the gym, did weights (is there any better term than “did weights”?), and tried to exercise on a stair-stepper machine. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that I can’t read while I step, just because of the design of the machine, so I spent 15 minutes quite bored, always stepping upwards. After 15 minutes I transferred to a treadmill (this being 1:30 in the afternoon, the gym was practically deserted, so I could choose my machinery), and just flat-out ran like the wind for five minutes.

That was fun.

No, really. I love the freedom that comes from running as fast as my legs can carry me. It’s one of the reasons why I’m trying to train myself to be able to run in races.

When I got home, I spent a few hours talking with Mom. She’s dealing with a few things, so she needs someone to bounce her perceptions off of. And, we listened to the first side of the first tape of Martin the Warrior, which she enjoyed as much as I did.

I spent most of the rest of the day puttering about. I managed to code a quite robust XML tag parser for Clio, as well as try out doxygen under AtheOS (it doesn’t seem to work at all; the app exits immediately whenever I try to run it).

Writing Thoughts

Fri

I put together a submission package for “Anime Explained” today, in preparation for mailing it out tomorrow.

What’s a submission package? It’s just a collection of everything that’s needed to submit an article to a publisher. It contains:

• The article itself, printed single-sided in a fixed-width font
• A query letter, introducing the article and describing my past publishing and work experience
• A SASE (Self-Addressed, Stamped Envelope), stamped and addressed to myself, which the publisher will put the rejection or acceptance letter in to mail to me

Then all of that is fastened together with the all-important paper clip, and slid into a manila envelope, which is addressed to the publisher. My submission to Parents magazine is now sitting on my desk, waiting to be mailed.