I Am Writing My Name

I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.  I am writing my name.

Over and over again.  Over and over again.  Over and over again.  Over and over again.  Over and over again.

. . . well, you get the picture, I’m sure.

This morning the UPS van pulled up with a package containing 700 (or maybe a thousand) signature sheets for the limited-edition, signed hardback of The Book of Swords, a new anthology with a new Ice and fire story by George R.R. Martin, and incidentally a non-Ice and Fire story by me, and non-Ice and Fire stories by other writers including Robin Hobb, CJ Cherryh, Kate Elliott, and Daniel Abraham.

The signed limited edition will be by Subterranean Press, by the way, but it isn’t yet on their website.  So if you want signage, watch this place for an announcement.

The timing, I must say, could have been better.  I’m off to Taos Toolbox on Saturday, and that means I’ve got plenty to do between now and then without writing my name over and over and over and over . . .

So I’ve spent much of the day in front of the TV, signing while I watched Amazon’s new epic six-episode documentary about the Grateful Dead, which was good because I didn’t have to watch it, all I had to do was listen.  What I was actually watching was my signature deteriorating from one page to the next, and it isn’t that legible a signature to begin with.  I sign checks and contracts with it, and that’s about it, because I learned to type when I was 10, and from that point on I typed everything, and maybe the last document I wrote in longhand was an exam in grad school, and that was a lot of decades ago.

It’s not my real legal signature anyway, it’s a special signature I developed because I could write it quickly in the event that someone dropped 1000 signature sheets on my doorstep with a short deadline.  Though I have to say it’s useful having my legal signature not be the one that everyone has access to.

So I signed until I was so clawed and cramped that I could no longer generate even a half-legible signature, and now I’m typing, which is what I do well, and when I’m done here I’ll type a lot more on Praxis VI and then go back to signing again, assuming that I can un-cramp my fingers.

Accomplishment.  This is how it’s done, cramp by cramp.