Putter

October 23

4:30 p.m.

Slept in until 11 a.m. today. Mmm. Sleeptacular.

Then I rose and twiddled around online for a while, reading journals and such. Oh, last night I revised a short story and sent it off to those notorious style monkeys at Strange Horizons -- see, the working never stops.

I took the train up to Berkeley and had a sandwich at Pannini, then sat in the courtyard at a bar, drinking a porter, listening to a four-piece jazz band play Coltrane tunes. All the while I worked on revising my novel. I got through over a third of the book today... and I still think it's good. I'm catching lots of weird inconsistencies (apparently I never made any firm decisions about, say, what month it is when the action takes place), and I'm line editing a lot, but all that's to be expected -- the important thing is, I haven't encountered any caltrops, man-traps, deadfalls or cave-ins.

After beer I went to a café and had some coffee, still revising away. I came home around 4, checked e-mail, and am now in the midst of printing out a bunch of stuff to read over vacation -- stories I've been sent for critique, the next big chunk of my novel, and so forth. Heather should be home soon, and we'll have dinner, and pack for our trip. We're off to Santa Cruz tomorrow afternoon, for a few days of beer-drinking, beach-sitting, fun-filled vacation. Whoo!

October 23

1:15 p.m.

Okay, so I never managed to post that entry last night, and it was kind of wimpy anyway, so here's a bit more. Heather came home last night, and we went out to get good sandwiches (sammitches!) and ravioli and Jones soda (Mmm) for dinner. We rented Kissing Jessica Stein, which was really damn sweet, and it's well worth getting the DVD -- there're some great deleted scenes. Then we sat around and read together; we've started buying the Preacher collections, because I love them and Heather's never read them, so we cuddled peacefully on the couch and read about vampires, and people getting boards-with-nails-poking-through stuck on their faces, and so forth. We went to bed, but wound up talking for a long time, mostly about our families, and about our future... nice.

We woke this morning around 11:30, frolicked, and have been puttering and sort-of getting ready to leave ever since. I got a rejection from Gothic.net (in less than two weeks!), very friendly and positive and all that, but still a "no." So it goes. I also got invited to a surreal/horror anthology that actually pays a decent rate (for genre writing, anyway), but I've got months and months before the deadline. I may rewrite my train hijacking story for it, unless I get an equally good idea for something new.

Okay. That's enough. Time to pack. Talk to you in a few days.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 176,100

Words written since last entry:
Nope. Just revising.

Send eldritch candles. And stygian fruit. And cyclopean doughnuts.

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

We have always depended on the kindness of stranglers [sic].