Surreal Candy

November 5

Mmm, candy. Candy candy candy. Mmm.

(Am now eating candy. Entry will resume momentarily)

There's a World Fantasy Award on my desk at work. Specifically Shaun Tan's Best Artist World Fantasy Award. We're keeping it for him, for a little while. There's a purple (or possibly blue) plush octopus sitting on top of the World Fantasy Award. I'm not entirely sure why it's there. Not exactly a squid on the mantelpiece, but sorta.

My job is so surreal sometimes.

I wish I had a World Fantasy Award.

And speaking of which, hurray for Tim Powers, winning for Declare! Woo and hoo! And hurray for the Tems (Steve & Melanie), winning for "The Man on the Ceiling"! Which I think is a better choice than Ted Chiang's "72 Letters", which was the only other novella on the ballot that I'd actually read.

(And for the curious, the other award winners are listed here, and a list of all the nominees is here)

So, I made a sale. My poem "9 Arguments for Blowing Up the Moon" has been accepted by Star*Line, and should appear in the March issue. It's an unusual poem for me, very non-narrative. I think the 9 sections (short sections, it's not a very long poem) combine well to create a characterization of the speaker of the poem.

In her current entry my lovely girlfriend Heather links to this erotic Buffy fan-fic comic strip, justifiably, methinks. I'm normally not one for fan-fic, normally definitely not one for erotic fan-fic... but this is funny erotic fan-fic, and surprisingly well-drawn. It's a labor of love. I hope the artist doesn't get sued... (Good luck getting to the site, too; I kept getting the "too many users" error when I tried to check the links in this entry)

That evil vampire Willow. Whoo. And tonight there's an all-singing, all-dancing, crazy sweeps-week musical episode of Buffy. I'm tentatively excited; it could be bad, or it could be really good and funny. We'll see.

Finished Wicked, didn't like it as much all the way through as I did at the beginning, but definitely good stuff. Enjoyed seeing Wonder Boys; wanna read the book, now. Currently reading Cordelia's Honor, as people keep telling me I gotta read the series. Tandem reading (re-reading, actually, as I first read it in high school) The Little Country by Charles de Lint, which is brilliant and lovely.

Work's good. I'm becoming ever more sanguine about making phone calls to publishing houses. I hardly break out in a sweat at all anymore.

Forgive the all-out-of-order-ness. Let's see, backfill... last night Heather and I went to the gym, of all places, and worked out. I'm not even a bit sore, today, either; my body's probably too confused by the experience of exercise to properly convey the pain that it is, surely, feeling. We had dinner at Long Life noodle (rah rah Dragon's Breath! That's super-garlicky lo mein, with button mushrooms, mmm). We came home, and I wrote 1200 words of Rangergirl, a fun little scene that made Heather laugh a lot when she read it.

Mmm. Water. Good really cold water. Almost as good as candy, in its way.