Riddle me this: What do Albert Costello, Gilberto Elmore, Lucy Beatty, Millie Peoples, Hugh Murphy, Stewart Landis, Sondra Dolan, Leola Kim, Lethia Schafer, Blake Woodruff, and Juliana Overton have in common? Well, here's a hint: I've received spam "from" each of them in the last 24 hrs., generally trying to sell me Viagra, hoodia, or offering some surefire method to bilk my creditors. This is why I switched from the lowred.mail@mac.com account to the new gmail account. For a couple of months now, I've been getting about thirty of these a day. And I do have to wonder if, somewhere, some poor sap has received e-mail from Caitlín Kiernan trying to sell them weight-loss drugs, or if maybe someone else has e-mail from Nar'eth ni'glecti Mericale offering to get him (or her) stiff for half the price?

By the way, today is International Women's Day, first observed in 1909 "in accordance with a declaration by the Socialist Party of America." So, today I shall endevour to pretend that it isn't true that nationwide, as of 2000, women were making only 77.6 percent as much per hour as men, or that the same year, Georgia ranked 47th in America among all states in progress in closing the hourly wage gap between the sexes. I shall pretend things aren't a lot worse for women in much of the world, and that the present administration in this country isn't doing its damnedest to rob women of reproductive choice (in a nation of 300 million and a world of 6.5 billion). I shall try. And then tomorrow I'll go back to all the dingy realities.

Not a bad day yesterday. I wrote 1,118 words and finished "Untitled 20." It's total word count stands at 3,234 before I begin polishing it today. I've already sent it along to Vince. This means that this month Sirenia Digest subscribers will be getting almost ten thousand words of fiction (not counting the little prologue thingy). I'm happy with the new vignette. Spooky likes it a lot. It bounces from golems to Paracelsus to Frankenstein, and I'm curious what readers will make of it all. My lit agent called yesterday afternoon. She's been ill. We talked briefly about Daughter of Hounds and the feared What Will I Be Doing Next? beast.

Other good things about yesterday? A very nice walk. Warm weather. E-mail from my mother. Pete Crowther sent me copies of the signed PS Publishing editions of Bradbury's R is for Rocket and S is for Space. These are absolutely gorgeous volumes, and they remind me that soon I must begin my introduction for The Day It Rained Forever. These good mail days are spoiling me, I fear. Today and tomorrow, no doubt, it will only be bills and adverts once again.

Last night, we watched Sam Mendes' Jarhead (adapted from Anthony Swofford's book of the same name). Whether or not it's wrong of me to do so, I've come to look at war movies as being of two classes: those that serve as little more than recruiting propaganda (John Wayne's The Green Berets is a classic of this subgenre) and those that honestly depict the horror and absurdities of modern warfare (Apocalypse Now, etc.). It's difficult for me to imagine humanity has much use for the former (no matter how much they might serve TPTB), while it should have a tremendous hunger for the latter. I wasn't sure where Jarhead would fall, but was pleased to see that it belongs very soundly in the latter camp, and is a fine film, to boot. We'd intended to rent Walk the Line, but once again no copies were in at Videodrome, and we do our best to avoid Blockbuster.

I also caught a documentary on the Science Channel on supermassive black holes and their role in the creation of galaxies. It contained an equation that struck me as being so perfectly beautiful as to be divine: the mass of supermassive black holes located at galactic cores are = to 1/2 of 1% of the total mass of their galaxies. To date, no exceptions have been found.

Tonight, the final episode of season two of Project Runway. Viva Santino!

Spooky's posted new photos of Sweet William. Unfortunately, you can't see the colour very well, because they were taken under tungsten light instead of sunlight. He's a sort of grey lavender, with a pink nose and pink paws. We've been chatting, he and I, and I know now that after the loss of his legs in a freak vacuum-cleaner accident, he was a world-renowned amputee unicyclist. However, carpal-tunnel syndrome and a weariness of public appearances led to his early retirement and these days he's a simple beggar, which, if you ask me, is more honest work than platypus pimpage.

Postscript: There shall be a second entry, later today, because you guys said you wanted to hear about some of the Wicca stuff, and because there was a dream last night. Also, I just got word from subpress that the limited of Alabaster has sold out, though copies of the trade edition are still available for pre-order.