• Location: Issedon Tholus
• Mood: relieved
• Music: Joy Division, "She's Lost Control"

"'Cause sometimes it rains fish from the sky."

Bitter cold here in Providence. Right now, 18F, though the wind chill has it feeling like 3F. The snow is hardly even beginning to melt. The sun is bright, and the sky is a blue bowl laid over the city.

It's very difficult to make entries after days that are consumed with line edits, as line editing is surely one of the least interesting and most tedious stages of writing a novel. Fixing commas, misspellings, grammatical errors, etc. Hundreds upon hundreds that I couldn't be bothered to get right to start with. At this point, we're working through the notes that Sonya (sovay) kindly supplied after she read the manuscript for The Red Tree. Then we have two additional sets of line-edit notes to work through. Of course, this is all in advance of the actual copyeditor's notes. We made it halfway through the book yesterday.

I also carefully read over the editorial letter, and it's one of the best I've ever gotten. I was amenable to pretty much every suggestion my editor made, which was an enormous relief. I still have to email her, though I may not get to that until tomorrow.

I need to get the epilogue written, but I wanted to go over the pages a couple of times first.

See? Duller than dishwater.

I've only left the house once since the tooth extraction last Thursday, and I think I need to get out of here for a bit. But that probably can't happen until tomorrow.

The primary function of this journal for the next couple of weeks will likely be to promote A is for Alien, due out next month from Subterranean Press. To repeat what I said yesterday, please, if you have not yet ordered the book, and are able, it would be greatly appreciated if you did so now. It contains some of my best short-story work to date, including "Bradbury Weather" and "Riding the White Bull." And it's going to be a truly beautiful volume:



The other helpful thing would be subscribing to Sirenia Digest, which has pretty much become the "bread and butter" of my income. So, if you want to help, and are able, there you go, and I thank you ahead of time. If you've already done both these things, as I said yesterday, you rock. Also, I'm wondering if anyone might be kind enough to volunteer to create a banner ad from the cover of A is for Alien?

I think my coffee is freezing. I should go before Herr Platypus brandishes hisherits venomous spurs again.