Yeah, two days with no entries. There's just no way to make day after day of the minutiae of proofreading interesting. But, yesterday we did "Bradbury Weather," which brought us to the end of the eight stories in A is for Alien. And taking it all at once, over just four days, these tales written between 2003 and 2007, I am really quite pleased with the collection. It's a better book than Tales of Pain and Wonder, a far better book than From Weird and Distant Shores, and probably even better than Alabaster and To Charles Fort, With Love. There is a certain overt repetition of central themes, and at first that bothered me. But, really, it's no different than what Angela Carter did in, say, The Bloody Chamber (1979), and I am always happy to make "mistakes" like those. Anyway, the contracts on the book have been signed, and today they go in the post to subpress, and the ms. goes off to Sonya Taaffe (sovay) in Massachusetts for a thorough proofreading. As soon as subpress starts taking pre-orders, I'll let you know. There will be a chapbook included with this collection, though I'm still finalizing its contents.

And speaking of Sonya, congratulations on what I hear was a very well received reading at ICFA.

So, it's been something like thirty six days since I came down with the flu (started showing symptoms on February 13th, the day I had to be in Birmingham for the second round of dentistry). And, twelve tins of Altoids later, the goddamn wracking cough is still with me. It's a little better, but not nearly better enough. At least it got me off cigarettes again. The desire to smoke utterly vanished as soon as I got sick last month. Meanwhile, Spooky's ears are still giving her fits, and she has four days of antibiotics left.

Not a whole lot else to say about the last few days, really. I managed to go from Saturday afternoon (March 15th) to yesterday without leaving the house, a total of eight days. My record is, I think, eleven, set back in 1998 or so. And now we have a cold snap, so I won't be going out today (in fact, I hear rumours of snow flurries this ayem). But Spooky did drag me out yesterday, all the way to Freedom Park. She's spending most of her time searching for an apartment or house in Providence, and we have some hopeful leads. I packed the first two boxes yesterday, one shelf from one bookcase in my office, an exercise which led to the rather grim conclusion that, by a conservative estimate, we'll be packing a minimum of 140 boxes of books (printing paper boxes from Staples, Kinkos, etc.). Never mind all the boxes of comp copies of my various books. Another twenty or so there, but they are mostly already packed.

Saturday night, Byron came over for a couple of episodes of Torchwood. We are already missing him, and truly, there won't be much else to miss about this city. We're well into Season Five of Angel, having watched "Life of the Party" and "The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco" (later Saturday night).

A nice reader comment from Friday's entry, courtesy fuchsiafalling:

Love your books. Love seeing us queers in fiction as just regular old main characters, the plot being about something other than queerness, it just being NBD. It thrills me.

It's the way I've almost always approached writing about queerness. Two editors once rejected a story (this was back in '95 or so) because, although the two main characters were lesbians, the story was not about them being lesbians. The editors lamented the fact that "they just happened to be lesbians," and that I'd not used the opportunity to explore the social ramifications of lesbianism. Never mind that the story was set at least a hundred years in the future, and that I have no bloody idea (and neither does anyone else) what it will mean to be a lesbian in the 22nd Century. But, yes. Thank you.

A big night for me in Second Life last night, as Nareth (well, the Nareth in Toxian City) stopped being a somewhat cybernetic Nephilim bound to two aspects of the same demon, and recently driven to some schizophrenia-like dementia, and became, instead, a rather spectacular vampire. My thanks to omegamorningsta, Lorne, Larissa, Pontifex, Merma, Denny, and the rest of the Omega Institute for a marvelous night of rp. As Lorne (the aforementioned demon) observed "You are a vampire wrought of one with an angel's soul. Some might consider you something more profaned than a vampire wrought from a human, but such is the perspective of overzealous idiocy...You are a diamond crucifix turned to a ruby dagger for drawing hearts out of supplicants..." Nice. But the really cool thing about this scene — or so it struck me — is that we had players from the US to Nova Scotia to Madrid to Brisbane, making almost a complete global loop, all working together to create story in realtime. Awesome.

Okay. There's coffee out there somewhere.