Raining Babies

October 5

Friday was pretty nice, an easy day at work and then home, where I watched The Virgin Suicides with Heather. Didn't think much of the movie; it seemed all style and no substance, as if the filmmakers believed repetition somehow equated with depth, as if a motif were the same as a theme. Had pretty moments, though. It was otherwise a mostly lazy evening, though I did write about a thousand words, starting a collab with Nick Mamatas (the suggestion and subject were his). He sent back part two, and I wrote part three this morning (another 800 words or so), and he just sent back part four. I'll either finish it off or come close tomorrow morning. Whoo! This is the sort of good quick weird writing I wanted to do.

So today we went into the city to Holly's baby shower, at her friend's fabulous fucking apartment. I wish I had a fabulous apartment in the city, but those require money, which would mean getting some kind of job that I'd hate and probably not be very good at, so that's out. Ah, well. If I took up residence in a fabulous apartment, it'd probably be full of spiders, dead plants, heaps of paper, and tottering stacks of books within a week anyway. So this way's probably for the best. It did make me wish we could paint the walls in our house, though, and would it kill the landlady to install a couple of skylights and, like, a balcony? Man. It's not like I ask for a lot.

The baby shower was pretty fun, lots of good food, nice dogs, nice people, silly games (I even won one of the games, and got some lotion or something. Heather will use it). After that, we wandered a bit in the city, despite the brain-boiling heat...

I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow's first novel, which is coming out sometime early next year, I think. It's good, a very fast, fun, entertaining read. I read most of it sitting in Brainwash, the laundromat-café that Karen's sister Gail manages. Gail came over and chatted with us a bit. Seeing her made me miss Karen, actually; they look so much alike, it reminded me of my distant friend... Karen put some of her Thought Experiment archives back up, yay! It's the wonderful conversations between her and Pär, and if you haven't read them before, go do so! I wish I could write dialogue half as good as they actually have!

Tonight we watched some awful Kirsten Dunst movie, because Heather's all about Kirsten Dunst (as I told Holly, Heather wants to lick Kirsten Dunst's cute little upturned nose). It was called Get over It!. Complete with exclamation point. Super lame. I only made it through the whole movie because it was less than 80 minutes long (and I was getting squirmy before an hour was up).

Otherwise, not much going on. Played some video games. Reading Evening's Empire. Drinking Kahlua and milk, wishing for vodka, too lazy to go to the liquor store and buy some. Tomorrow is a big work-fest, lots of writing and slush-reading to do, various things in my inbox I need to deal with, people I need to write to. I should call my Dad...

Hey, so check out my discussion board, yo. I jumped on the QuickTopic train. Awesome. Apparently my mom is happy to answer embarrassing questions about me there, so go for it!

Words written since February 1, 2002: 170,800

Words written since last entry:
1,800

Send me the Gnostic gospels written on a grain of rice.

Tim Pratt
P.O. Box 13222
Berkeley, CA 94712-4222

Cheaper than Scientology and more good.