Divers Things

November 4

Well, damn. Charles Sheffield passed away. He'd been sick for a while -- brain tumors -- and it was pretty much just a matter of time. Not wholly unexpected, but still -- damn. I understand he was a wonderful man. His fiction mostly isn't to my taste (very little hard SF is), but he had a deft hand at nonfiction, too, and wrote about science very engagingly. He has an interesting and idiosyncratic bio on his website; it's worth reading. I feel awful for Nancy Kress, too... they were only married a few years.

Sigh.

***

I updated the Tropism Press page, creating individual pages for Flytrap and for our chapbooks, Living Together in Mythic Times and the forthcoming Floodwater. This is what happens when I get the urge to update my website at 1 a.m. on a Saturday night...

In Floodwater news, Heather's awesome-artist friend Richard Doyle has agreed to do cover and interior illustrations for the chapbook. Woo woo woo!

***

I'm getting some good movie advice on the comments board -- keep it coming! Once I achieve a critical mass of trivia, and decide whether the Movie story is a romance or a horror piece (it's one of the two), I'll start working on it.

***

I spent this afternoon crawling around under my boss's house, helping wire the downstairs computers for DSL. Bet you didn't know Assistant Editors did stuff like that, didja? I spent yesterday afternoon revising my novel, which is so damn long. I'm still happy with it, I still think it's good, but the stack of pages-to-go is still so thick (though it's now thinner than the stack of pages-I've-finished), and hacking-and-slashing is not the fun part of writing, for me. Still, it'll be a better book for all this work... I'm just itching to work on something fun (which, for me, means writing first drafts). I can enjoy the revision process for a while -- long enough to revise even a novelette easily -- but working on the novel is kind of a drag, cutting out useless adverbs, weighing the worth of individual lines and paragraphs, scribbling new lines and paragraphs, for page after page after page... Ah, well. If it were easy, it wouldn't be as worthwhile...

***

I got my contract and check for "Carcinodjinn" yesterday (by the simple method of picking them up off Susan's floor when Heather and I went over to water her plants), so, whoo! That check will pay two Flytrap contributors! Or for 1/3 of one of Heather's grad-school applications. Or for 1/8 of the dental work necessary for one of Heather's teeth... Nah, better to think of it as two Flytrap contributors. More cheery.

We got the January 2003 Asimov's at work today, and my poem "My Night with Aphrodite" is there, la. I'll probably get my copies soon. Unless our deranged mailman shreds them for packing material. Also saw a copy of the new issue of The Third Alternative, which I hope will be available in the bookstores soon -- I could read it at work on my lunch break, but I'd rather sit with it while drinking a cup of coffee, linger and enjoy.

***

Y'all here about this Spookycon thing? I'm thinking about going -- it's just across the Bay, after all, and I'd love to meet Caitlín R. Kiernan, David Schow, Ramsey Campbell and the Gothic.net folks. I find it exceedingly strange that they charge more for a membership if you're a "pro" taking part in panels and such... seems an odd way to run things, making people pay $10 for the privilege of, you know, providing programming for the con. But I might go anyway, though it's unlikely I'd go in my, heh, professional capacity.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 176,100

Words written since last entry:
Still revising.

Send me to your leader.

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

Donation haiku:
Leaves fall, crunchy rain/ the moon rises, not unlike/ our cost of living.