You guys are so lucky.

I was prepared to write a long, sad entry, full of self-doubt and misery, about loneliness and the recent decay of my sense of wonder (by recent I mean, basically, since this afternoon). I was going to make references to The Purple Rose of Cairo. It was going to be bad.

But I checked my email first.

And got a message from Jed at Strange Horizons, accepting my story "The Fallen and the Muse of the Street."

That knocked the moody purple right off my rose. :)

It was a pretty good mail day in another respect, too. I got my check from Deep Outside for my story "The Dog Boys." These two sales, plus some other nickel-and-dime poetry sales (read: found money), mean I can afford to pay my half of Meg's plane ticket for her visit next March, a visit we were thinking about canceling for financial reasons. That's not a problem now. Whee!

I mean, really, how can my sense of wonder decay in a world where there are people who'll pay me money for the right to publish a story I wrote? A world where I can pay for a plane ticket with my imagination?

Man. This couldn't have come at a better time. I was really down tonight, guys, and now I'm up again.

I won't go into too much historical detail on "Fallen," except to say that it owes much of its existence to my friend Donna Bond. Among other things, she's an artist, and you can find some of her work here (Warning: There's a little fantasy/ nudity/ kink stuff there, so if you've got a problem with that, don't go).

Well, the hour grows late, and my night's not likely to get any better, so I'm off to bed.

Whee!