Realms of the Raven

No big shore excursions today. It was an at sea day on our way from Seattle to Juneau, Alaska. The seas were a little choppy after we got out of the Strait of Juan de Fuca but not unbearably so. Because we had no real plans or shore excursions planned, we didn’t try to get up at any particular time but just slept in until we naturally woke up.

Probably the oddest thing about having on interior cabin is that it can be absolutely pitch black with no point of reference when waking. It was a little disorienting at first but I realized (much later in the day, of course) that my watch has an Indiglo face. Wow – I could have just pressed its button all along. Doh!

Buffet breakfast was the first item on the agenda. The food wasn’t terrific but it was certainly plentiful. Lots of bacon, too!

I had some time so I took the laptop and went off to the ship’s library to work on my two books in progress. I had originally intended to check my email on the laptop but discovered that both the ship’s internet café and the wireless was $.35 per minute and the place to get wireless reception was in the big central lounge area. Since I’d pretty much warned folks that I would have very limited, if any, access to email, I decided to wait on any of that. The added bonus to this was that I had no email, etc to distract me from the writing I was supposed to be doing.

Early in the afternoon was the Fire Opal and gemstone talk that I wanted to attend, albeit mostly in hopes of winning the earrings they were having a Now the lady who won the earrings (nice round studs by the way) was busy looking at a necklace to go with them and her husband and mine were bonding as only men who are watching their wives shop for expensive jewelry can – with a mix of dread, fear and the slightest bit of hope that the wife will not like anything on offer. And 99.9% of the time, it’s a vain hope indeed.

And this time was no exception.

The earrings were a lovely drop trillion shape and perfectly matched the necklace I had on. So I bought them. Good thing I had already gotten word of a nice hefty bonus before we left on this trip.

Chuck was a very gracious and sweet husband and merely shook hands with the other lady’s husband and wished him luck as well. Then he complimented me on how nice they looked.

We went back to the cabin to drop off some of the stuff we were carrying and Chuck decided to go back out for a while but I decided to take a nap instead. After an hour or so nap, I decided to go check email and such before meeting Chuck for dinner.

I did manage to log into my Gmail account and skimmed the messages, basically looking for only those to me personally and not to a list. There were only a few and none of those was any emergency at home, thank the Lady.

But there was an email I had been both anticipating and dreading for months, literally. It was an email from an editor at – where my short story “Tort & Retort” was under consideration. And it was, indeed, a rejection. Well, sort of. The editor liked the story but asked if I would consider expanding it and resubmitting it directly to her -- because the story was just too short to show good character development. So she liked my voice and my characters and wanted more story. After a moment or two of feeling dejected, I sent a nice thank you and told the editor that I was considering expanding it to 25k (from 12k) and would let her know when that was done.

This was one of the two formal nights on the ship but Chuck and I had both decided we really didn’t want to dress up so we again hit the buffet and then off to bed.