So near the end of this March now, New Consolidated as it is. Yesterday, I did 1,685 words, and I wrote 1,564 words the day before. My fingertips are bloody, and I'm missing a thumbnail, but that's nothing that will not heal. From where I sit this morning I can see THE END, though several perils might yet lie between myself and that golden fleece. The target date of Sunday, February 25th remains tenable as the final day of marching.

There has actually been very little else to the past two days. Just the writing. Outside, it's warm, near 70F both days, but I haven't taken walks. I wake and sit down at the keyboard, have coffee, have Red Bull, and write until late.

Speaking of Outside, there's a murder of crows squawking in the tree out front. They will just have to wait.

Last night, we watched Christina Ricci in Brian Gilbert's The Gathering (2002). It was rather a mess, and Ricci's acting was pretty much nonexistent. Still, there were some intriguing concepts in back of it all; a shame the film was not better executed.

Afterwards, we finished reading Dan Simmons' new novel, The Terror. This is a brilliant book. I'm really no good at this whole review thing. It was a brilliant novel, filled with awe and beauty and horror and moments of transcendent joy. There's a quote here from an actual review by John Clute, posted by sovay to one of my LJ entries last week, which says it better than I can:

If we are to take literally everything that happens, we need to think of ourselves as inhabiting another kind of story. It is a tale of wrongness—the sort of wrongness that, in a novel of the fantastic, augurs and manifests an amnesia about the true nature of the world. Franklin and his officers—even the supple-minded Crozier at the start of things, before he begins to learn the score—are not simply white men who don't get the point, though it is blindingly clear that their contemptuous and culture-bound refusal to adopt any of the techniques the Inuit use to survive in the far North constitutes a fatal failure to get a very practical point, that you cannot make the world do your bidding by bullying it. But that's not the whole of it. What the white men of The Terror also manifest is another, far more terrible and terminal fact, a 21st-century fact, that maybe you can't make the world do your bidding by bullying it, but you can certainly kill the world trying to.

By all means, this is a novel you should read. Afterwards, we began reading Mitch Cullins' A Slight Trick of the Mind, which concerns Sherlock Holmes at age 93, just after WWII.

My grateful thanks to girfan and matwinser, who are sending me the UK "Lesser Octopus" stamps I mentioned last week. I shall be sending each of you some a little something soon (if I have your addresses).

Please take a moment to have a look at the latest eBay auctions. There's a copy of the ARC of From Weird and Distant Shores, one of the last I'll be able to offer. The same is true of the copies of "On the Road to Jefferson" and Candles for Elizabeth. There's also an ARC of the Subterranean Press edition of Low Red Moon and a copy of The Five of Cups.

And now I go attend a bleating platypus...