I think the worst of this bug has passed. I gradually began to feel better yesterday, and by last night, much of the discomfort had abated. This morning, it's mostly post-nasal drip and sniffles. So, that could have been a lot worse.

I wrote 1,371 words on "At the Gate of Deeper Slumber" yesterday, and reached THE END. Today, I'll read through the whole story, and I think I'll be doing a lot of polishing and tweaking afterwards. It seems a little more rough than usual, what with me having written it while sick and all. Remember, this one will appear in Sirenia Digest #41 at the end of the month.

Also, the first-pass page proofs for The Red Tree arrived yesterday. I have until May 7th to get them back to NYC. It's starting to look like a novel, this thing that I'd hardly begun writing this time last year. That never ceases to throw me a little. I was talking to Kathryn about The Red Tree late last night, mostly about how it's not really connected to all the other novels, and how I intend to push it the way I pushed Silk, way back when. I have some hope, some small hope, that it might reach a wider audience than my earlier novels.

Last night, Spooky went out and got a pizza, and we spent the evening binging on Season 6 of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, including one of my favorite episodes, "Once More, With Feeling." We watched that one twice, actually, because we let it play a second time with Joss Whedon's commentary. We had the bedroom window open until late, and the air smelled marvelous.

You know, I'm genuinely beginning to miss the world where "google*" was a relatively obscure mathematical term, where "yahoo" referred to "a crude or brutish person" (derived from the Yahoos of Swift's Gulliver's Travels), where "Amazon" referred either to a South American river or to Ἀμαζόνες, a nation of fierce female warriors. When a "blackberry" was a fruit, and "twitter" was just a noise that birds made. When phrases like "bluetooth" and "facebook" and "livejournal" meant nothing whatsoever (well, there was Harald Bluetooth Gormson), and to send someone mail, you needed a stamp. I've been feeling even more nostalgic than usual. Also, I'm beginning to have trouble properly allocating the resources I have available for worry, between the economy, Pakistan, melting ice caps, and now the swine-flu outbreak in Mexico. Is this the darkness before the dawn, or the calm before the storm? I'm guessing the latter.

* Okay, yeah, I know, technically that was "googol" (the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros), but, fuck it, it was such a great way to begin the paragraph...