slightly more awakePhew. Long frelling paragraph.
There's been some very good and much-appreciated conversation in the phorum the last few days, regarding my decision to write under a pseudonym and the pressures of being a working novelist in today's market. You might check it out. Just click here and look at the thread titled "Journal Follow-Ups..." I think the conversation in question begins in the 7/27 entries (or thereabouts).
As evidence of how far out of touch with the vertebrate paleontology community I've gotten, I've only just learned of the death of Professor John Ostrorm. Ostrom was responsible, in large part, for the "Dinosaur Renaissance" of the 1970s, following his discovery of the maniraptoran theropod Deinonychus in 1964. He was mentor to Dr. Robert T. Bakker, who, in turn, was my mentor in the mid-1980s. Our understanding of the evolution of birds owes much to Ostrom's studies of non-avian theropods and fossil birds, especially his work on Archaeopteryx. I met him in 1986 in Philadelphia.
Anything else about yesterday? The signature sheets for both To Charles Fort, With Love and Frog Toes and Tentacles arrived, but I'm not going to be able to get to them until early next week. Last night, I mostly tried to relax, in hopes of getting a good night's sleep. I finished Pariah for the XBox. Few games that I've bothered to finish have suffered from a such a muddled storyline. And, like I said, the fps perspective was even more claustrophobic that usual, sort of like wandering around staring through the cardboard tube at the center of a roll of paper towels. Then Spooky and I watched Val Guest's excellent The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), a very creepy and understated vision of apocalypse. And that was yesterday.
