Breathe

July 20

9:20 a.m.

Hello, my peeps. I did not sleep well last night. I had that thing where I could only breathe while sitting up, so I spent a lot of time getting out of bed, back in bed, out of bed, and so on. I settled down around 3 a.m., I guess, but even then I didn't get pure unbroken sleep. It sounds like Heather had a rough night, too, poor sweet.

See, when we live together, at least we'll be able to keep one another company on miserable, sleepless nights.

Timprov has declared a winner in the pool-- and it's Marissa! I must admit, though, Heather and I did coo at one another lovingly yesterday... we just did it on the phone instead of in our journals.

Karina survived Clarion, and came out positively transformed... which is the best of what Clarion can be, I think. It's more than a writing workshop. And look at Karina's footwork as she dances around that elephant! I'm looking forward to reading her Clarion retrospective...

Hmm. Yesterday. I bailed out of work early, as I'd expected I would. I got some food and consumed about a million milligrams of Vitamin C. I took echinacea. I drank tea. I edited Chapter 6 of Genius, which is like 40 pages long, so that took a while. I'm keenly aware that this is the last time I'm going to work on these chapters (unless/until an editor asks for re-writes), so I'm pretty anal about it. Which didn't stop me from making typing errors that I didn't catch. Fortunately, a few of my friends are reading the novel chapter by chapter as it emerges, and they notice such mistakes for me.

Let's see. I went to Pergolesi and read part of The Quorum. Also read bits of Moonlight and Vines and Trader by de Lint, bits of Lansdale's The Two-Bear Mambo, bits of The Prophecy Machine... I had a hard time focusing on anything, because my brain gets fuzzy when I'm sick, so I jumped from book to book. Finally settled on Quorum, for the most part. I like it even better on the second read.

I was having trouble reading Prophecy Machine, which is why I resorted to all the skipping-around yesterday. Being sick really colors my perceptions, in an annoying way. I can't re-read Dinner at Deviant's Palace without feeling nauseous (sorry, Powers!), because I first read it during the worst illness of my adult life, a two-day nauseafest at my mom's house a few years ago. The illness got associated with the book, and vice-versa. I felt the same thing happening with Barrett's book, and since I'd like to enjoy it, I stopped reading it. It doesn't help that lots of stuff in the book is just vile; lots of filthy settings. One of the houses is described as being "like a garbage museum." Which is a cool line, but not so good to read when I'm feeling like an exhibit in the garbage museum myself.

So, apart from the Genius chapter, I was startlingly unproductive. I submitted a reprint to a small-press horror antho and got a rejection in about an hour. It was a nice rejection, and he asked to see more, but I don't have any other horror story reprints under 2000 words to send him, alas. I lolled around on the couch watching bad television, including a lunatic on the local cable-access channel. He was banzai-crazy, cursing and shrieking and smacking stuff with a stick, yelling about the environment, mis-pronouncing things left and right, and making very little sense. He has a web-site, and I would link to it, but then he might follow the referrer info back to me, read this entry, and come kill me, since he's local. Even if y'all didn't follow the link to him from here, he probably does ego-searches all day long while wearing a gas mask and masturbating, and I'd hate for him to find this entry that way, too.

Y'all think I'm kidding. I'm totally not. The dude scared me. And yet, obviously, I found him strangely captivating.

I talked to Heather for a while, and we got into some surprisingly heavy stuff... I realized I hadn't eaten since morning, so I went to Saturn around midnight and had some food... came home and slept intermittently... and that about brings you up to date, I think.

Heather is coming to see me today. This, coming up, is my last weekend in Santa Cruz. The weekend after that is a birthday party in Oakland and moving day. I don't know if I'll write again before Monday. I might be too busy saying some goodbyes to this place that's been my home for the past year.