The Day Wore a Small Black Goatee
July 13
I woke up Friday morning in some sort of Bizarro/Spock-with-a-goatee world; I was cranky, exhausted, and grumbling, while Heather was singing, bouncy, energetic, and popping out of bed. This was very much a reversal of our normal modes of waking. I spent the entire morning feeling hungover (headache, nausea, general wobbliness, dehydration coupled with a disinclination to drink -- everything but photosensitivity) without the benefit of having gotten my drunk on the night before. Very unpleasant, and I still don't know what caused it, just that I started to feel better around mid-afternoon.
I read Greg Van Eeekhout's story "Will You Be an Astronaut?" in the September issue of F&SF yesterday at work. It's a marvelous piece of writing, pitch-perfect, fascinating, strange, chilling, uplifting, tragic, hopeful, complex. Greg has this marvelous ability to imply an entire fictional world through small details, to give the reader a sense that they're just glimpsing part of a fully realized universe. I thought that about his "Show and Tell", too, and that ability is one of the marks of a great SF writer, to suggest vastness without boring the reader with unnecessary panoramas or detailed history. So let me add Greg's name to Cory Doctorow's and Charles Stross's, for writers who keep me reading science fiction. (I like Mike Jasper's science fiction, too, but I respond more strongly to his fantasies.)
I consciously took it easy last night, for the benefit of my mental and physical decrepitude. We ordered pizza for dinner, and Heather and Holly and I hung out, drank wine, and played cards (penny poker -- just for funsies, not for keepsies, practice for a possible East Bay poker night). Very nice, if utterly unproductive. Around 1 a.m. I came upstairs and played Diablo for a while. I think my total blow-off-all-work attitude was good for me. I feel more refreshed and eager to write today than I have in a long time... why, since last weekend!
I did not intend to sleep until 1 p.m. on this fine Saturday, however. I slept in the bedroom, the cocoon of snuggly darkness, though, and that's what happened. So now I feel an obligation to work lots this afternoon and evening, particularly since we're having lunch with one of Heather's cousins tomorrow, and I won't be able to have a full-on Sunday writing-fest. Which is fine; I'm looking forward to meeting her cousin. But it means I have to write more (here it comes!) interstitially this weekend than I normally do. I suspect I'll go to a café somewhere to work, and it would be nice to go to the gym today, since we skipped last night.
Hmm, not much movement on the writing front. I don't think I've gotten any rejections since I last wrote (of course, we didn't get mail at all yesterday, which is unprecedented, and leads me to believe that our famously unreliable mailman decided to take a long weekend again). I did a bit of scribbling on the novel at work on Thursday, getting to the part where I introduce my last major character! Well, not introduce; we've been hearing his name, and seeing his work (he's a painter), and hearing about how he disappeared over a decade before, but now he's right there on stage, talking and doing things and so forth. Yesterday at work I just read...
I've finally gotten around to updating my links page, haphazardly, somewhat. The journals and weblogs listed now roughly represent the journals I read (though for most of the Web Rats and Not-a-Webring folks I haven't made individual links). I point you particularly toward Notes from Coode Street, Jonathan Strahan's blog. Jonathan is the reviews editor for A Certain Magazine (and he always edits me with a deft and light hand, something I much appreciate). He writes a lot about books and stories and SF, and while our tastes converge at a few points, his opinions are generally quite different from mine, and thus rather useful and even instructive.
And with that, I'm off to get some writing done. I'll natter on at you later.
Words written since February 1, 2002: 111,500
Words written since last entry: 800
No, seriously. Want. Any of them will do.
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