Ghoul Ash

October 27

I'm back in the land of oaks and honey after a couple of pleasant days down south in Santa Cruz. Lynne was a wonderful hostess, buying us beer, driving us to sushi bar Pink Godzilla (so that Heather and I could partake copiously of the unfiltered rice wine known as "crazy milk"), playing cards with us, giving us a housekey so that we could wander around unattended, buying us ice cream, and generally letting us take over her loft and living room for days. We read, bought comic books, sat at Pergolesi for hours, drank mocha chai, got a little work done, and generally relaxed. Marvelous. Though I'm bummed that we didn't make it to the haunted house on the boardwalk -- the yearly haunted house in Santa Cruz is run by local artists, and tends to be surreal and fascinating. Ah, well; maybe next year.

Saturday morning, as we ate our bagels and drank our chai on the deck at Pergolesi, Heather and I got to talking about things we want to do around the house, cleaning and organizing and crafts and projects and so forth, and we got so excited by the prospect that we loaded the car, bid Lynne fondly farewell, and drove home. We cleaned up our respective rooms a bit, then made dinner with supplies bought in Santa Cruz -- fettuccine with alfredo sauce, salad, and garlic-parmesan bread. Mmm. We also bought a bottle of wine from the Bonny Doon vineyard (the website is surprisingly amusing); they have beautiful labels, and the wine tastes good, too. Thanks to Scott and Lynne for introducing us to the stuff.

I did most of the layout work for our next Xmas chapbook last night. It's called Floodwater, and contains three never-before-published stories: A short-short by Heather called "Wetting the Bed", my short-short "The Heart, a Chambered Nautilus", and a collaboration titled "A Serious Case of Fairies". It's beautiful -- much more attractive, in my opinion, than last year's Living Together in Mythic Times, which makes sense, as I'm much more experienced at doing layout now. Heather is working on the illustrations, but once that's done, we'll be ready to proofread and get them printed. This one's going to be a limited edition of 100 copies, signed and numbered. As we did last year, we'll be sending copies to friends and relatives as holiday gifts, but we should have some left for you dear readers to buy, if you like. Stay tuned for further details...

Today I finished cleaning my room, which is quite lovely, now, no longer filled with tottering piles of unsorted mail, dirty laundry, and assorted junk. It's an open, clean, lovely garret now, and I expect to get a lot of work done in it over the next several weeks. I'm going into some sort of autumnal nesting mode, I think; I just want to stay home, drink coffee, sip wine, read, clean, write, revise... it's very nice. And much cheaper than going out and eating at restaurants every night. Let's hope these domestic impulses last...

We went to the grocery store tonight, which was a madhouse full of rude idiots, by and large. We normally shop late at night, when it's less crowded, but we didn't have any supplies to make dinner for tonight, so we had to go earlier. We got lots of veggies and other good things, and Heather is presently making goulash. Life is good, even if my vacation is over, starting tomorrow...

Words written since February 1, 2002: 176,100

Words written since last entry:
Still revising, thanks.

Send truffles.

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

All proceeds go toward teeth or 'zines. Probably almost never toward beer.