Love in the Time of Coffee

December 7

2:00 p.m.

Hey there, lovelies. It's a sunny bright Saturday in December, and all's well, at least in the top-level directory of my mind -- I suppose there are nagging worries and anxieties here and there deeper down, but for now I'm sipping coffee and basking in the glow of poetry.

I love editing. Love love love it. I'm sort of overstocked on poems (and what with the seemingly ongoing production problems with Star*Line, I don't even know when the issues I've put together will come out, exactly), so I'm only buying pieces I absolutely adore -- but nonetheless, I bought several this morning, because I got such good stuff. Good poetry makes me so goddamn happy, I love art!

Oh, speaking of art -- Floodwater is back from the printers and ready to go! Want to buy one? Click the button over on the right! Whoo! Signed and numbered and all that good stuff -- details on the above-linked Floodwater page.

I'm reading The Fall of the Kings, and it's great. Makes me wish I'd done graduate work in history (I was a history minor in college, and thought about double-majoring... but I went to Clarion instead of taking the necessary summer courses for the double BA. Not a choice I regret, but...).

Plans for the weekend: Sign and number copies of Floodwater! Get some copies in the mail to friends and family. Revise a story for Strange Horizons and send it back to them and hope they like it. Get through some of my snail-mail subs for Star*Line (I'm caught up on e-subs as of this morning, at least). Write a couple of new poems, I hope, and work on a new collaborative project I'll give details about later. Answer e-mail. Maybe write some fiction, if the mood strikes. And I already line-edited Heather's awesome new story, "When We Were Twelve" this morning.

Now that I don't have a novel to work on, I find I have a lot more time to finish other things on weekends! And nothing seems very daunting, really...

Okay, I'm off to take a walk. More later.

Midnightish

Mmm. The day continued nice. Heather and I, now lacking a gym membership (we just can't afford the $104 a month), decided we should be taking exercise more regularly, so we walked up to Piedmont Ave. On the way, we encountered several boxes of books on the sidewalk with a sign saying "Free." Naturally, we inspected the wares. It was mostly crap -- self-help books, a biography of Lee Iacocca -- but there was also Love in the Time of Cholera, one of my favorite books, which I don't have a copy of, and also a Gene Wolfe paperback, la. We walked all the way to the video store to drop off some DVD we'd kept for way too long, then all the way back down to the other video store (where we don't have late fees!). We rented Harvard Man and The Score, then hit the vegetable store for some avocados, tomatoes, etc., then went to Piedmont Grocery (where the yuppies shop) and got a loaf of bread, a jug of wine (well, a bottle; give me my poetic license), and some cheese and meat. We ducked into the comic shop for a bit, too, and Heather went into the underwear store while I stood outside and averted boredom by reading. We walked back home (the walk back is sadder; the scenery gets progressively uglier).

Once home, we divided our loaf of bread and made enormous sandwiches -- I had turkey, bacon, swiss, mayo, mustard, tomatoes, roasted red peppers, and avocado. Yum. I love sandwiches. My favorite food. We watched Harvard Man, which sucked, though as always it was a pleasure to see Sarah Michelle Gellar cursing and having sex (more explicitly than she does on Buffy!) and being bitchy, which was also the chief pleasure of Cruel Intentions. Deeply crappy and pretentious movie, though, for the most part.

Then Heather and I opened a bottle of wine and frolicked the evening away, la. She's as wonderful and exciting as she was during the first month we were together, y'all... hell, more so, because we know one another better now.

Later we watched The Score, which I liked, though I'd heard it was crappy -- it's certainly an adequate heist movie. Brando is no longer the theatrical power he once was, but I'd watch Ed Norton in a remake of Springtime for Hitler, he's so good.

Then we went into work mode, Heather going over my edits and getting her story ready to go out, me sitting amid a pile of reference books researching a story idea. It's still a tadpole, and may not be written at all, but it's an idea that's intrigued me for a while, and a plot and a set of associated images are becoming clear, so who knows? Maybe I'll work on it tomorrow.

For now, I'll read more, and sleep, and dream of waking in the morning to coffee, and productivity, and love...

Words written since February 1, 2002: 188,400

Words written since last entry:
200. A scene in what will probably be my next novel.

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