• Location: Helm's Deep
• Mood: exhausted
• Music: The Decemberists, "(My Own True Love) Lost at Sea"

Don't blink.

It is not my custom to be writing a journal entry (or anything else) this early, but here I am typing. I think I must have slept about eight hours last night. I awoke from the nightmares about ten. I still haven't shaken them loose.

Best I can presently recall, yesterday was a decent enough writing day, but frustrating. Once again, I only managed to do three letters on "The Black Alphabet." The first half was written in only two days. Two rare days when I actually enjoyed writing. The second half is looking as though it will take me four days, and thus far I've not felt the excitement and pleasure that came from composing A-N. Yesterday, I did Q through S. 1,161 words. I'd hoped to make it all the way through U, so I could have some hope of finishing today. But by 5 p.m. I was, as they say, tapped out.

As for the poll, I was surprised to see "Pony" emerge as the favourite piece from Sirenia Digest. Pleasantly surprised. Anyway, I'm thinking that "Pony," "Untitled 17," "Untitled 20," and "pas-en-arrière" will all four be reprinted in Tales from the Woeful Platypus. It's been hard choosing between "Madonna Littoralis" and "pas-en-arrière," but the latter finally wins out because a) I like it more and b) "Madonna Littoralis" is being reprinted in a magazine. So, my thanks to everyone who took the time to vote. There weren't many of you, given the number of subscribers. Those four pieces come, I think (me and math this early, yikes), to 12,330 words. Add another ten thousand or so words worth of original material, and that means a book just about the same length as Frog Toes and Tentacles.

A long walk yesterday evening. And we read Chapter 12 of The Triumph of the Moon ("Gerald's People"). This book would make a fine cure for fluffybunnyism, or what I've taken to calling Llewellynpressism.

My thanks to scarletboi for getting something up on the front page of the "yet to be redesigned" website besides that frelling default message from earthlink. The trilobite is, of course, Dicranurus.

Meanwhile, the world continues the scratch its head over the recent red rains in India. There's a new article in Popular Science. I do wonder what Fort would say. And, while I'd personally welcome the discovery that the microbes in questions are of an extraterrestrial origin, I don't trust Chandra Wickramasinghe even as far as the end of my nose. Back in the '80s, he was Fred Hoyle's crackpot co-conspirator in the charges that all the Solnhofen Archaeopteryx specimens were forgeries. An absurd charge, yes, but one which was, nevertheless, very expensive and time-consuming to dismiss. Okay. Time to write. T is for...

Oh, shit. It's June, already.