Hamfisted Snakebaby

December 19

What a long week! I won't go into too awful many details, I'll just hit the high spots...

Holly had her baby! Alastair (or Aleister or something, I'm not sure of the spelling) Dante. Whoo! Born on Tuesday morning, though I didn't meet him until this evening. He was described to me as being unusually long (he's 21 inches), with enormous hands and feet, so I had a mental image of some kind of hamfisted snakebaby. Heather went to see mother and baby Tuesday morning, a couple of hours after he was born, and she had that baby-proximity giddiness for the rest of the evening, even as I persisted in asking her "Would the baby fit inside a size 17 basketball shoe? Would the baby fit inside your book bag? Would the baby fit inside a ripe watermelon, if you hollowed the watermelon out?" But that's what she gets for going on about how small the kid is... So I met him tonight, held him for a while. Very small. Squinchy-eyed. No fussier than I would be if I'd been recently ejected from a womb and passed around to various strangers. Lots of hair. Your basic cute baby. I'll get to know him more as an individual as he develops a personality and so on. He's got that whole strangely-captivating thing babies have. He's not a hamfisted snakebaby at all.

(Incidentally, there should be some pictures of the baby up on Heather's site by now)

Busy week at work. We finished the issue today. Gah. I've seldom worked so hard, and I felt rushed, so I kept screwing up little things and having to do them over again. I think I'm getting burned-out on having a job I care about (see, the plan was always to have some job I didn't care about, and to give all my mental energy to writing). But, of course, I do care about this job, I'm proud of the publication I help put out, so I want to keep working there, but the flipside is, I actually give a damn, and I get stressed, which never really happened at any of the jobs I've held in the past, where I could barely pay attention and still be one of the best employees. Whereas at this job... well, this isn't a new rant, so I'll stop. It's just been a stressful couple of months. But there are days off smack in the middle of the next two weeks, and lots of presents next Wednesday, and there's good coffee in the freezer and good writing under my fingertips, and love in my heart and my house, and all the important things are nicely in line. Everything else, all the bad stuff, is just weather.

Speaking of bad stuff, though... we were all sitting around the house tonight, Heather and Holly and Linda (that's their mom) and I, and Justin was out in the yard having a smoke. We heard squealing tires and crunching metal, and I figured there was an accident out on the street. Linda, being from the Midwest and thus not conditioned to ignore loud and violent noises, went out to look, and Justin told her to get back in the house. A bit later he came in.

Apparently a car came roaring down our street (which is between two fairly main thoroughfares), followed closely by a minivan. The car drove up onto the sidewalk (which, near our house, is easily wide enough to accommodate a car) and smashed into some cars parked on the curb, but kept going. The minivan followed, and, according to Justin, began to "fall apart" in the street. The driver then emerged, waving a gun, at which point Justin came in and called the cops.

The cops came a bit later and talked to Justin. Apparently the first car struck a pedestrian on our street, less than a block from our front door, and severely injured him. The struck man refused medical attention (who knows why?), and, according to the police, he was basically bleeding to death on the street. The car also hit another vehicle that was backing out of a driveway.

Pretty awful. None of our cars were hit, though that was just luck -- we often park where the collisions occurred. And of course any of us could have been out on the street.

Our power went out, too, and I had to fiddle with the breakers for a while to get them to come back. That's what happens when five people are in the house, all of them in different rooms, using lights and appliances... this house is way small for that many people. I'm going Xmas shopping tomorrow night, and though the crowds will be horrid, it'll be nice to get out of the house -- I've been a super-homebody lately. Though I did have a nice dinner at Tropix last night with Heather and her mom. And a nice Tuesday night with Susan Marie and Heather, watching Buffy, drinking wine, talk talk talking.

So. Writing. Started a collab with Mike Jasper (which he bounced back to me tonight, whee!), and worked on my Fish story, and wrote a review of The Dwelling. Also made corrections to Star*Line 25.6 tonight, and it should (we hope) ship shortly after Xmas, and then we'll get the January/February issue out on time (barring the unforeseen) and we'll be back on schedule! If you haven't joined SFPA yet, do so! The issues I'm editing are coming out! Great poetry by Erin Donahoe, Jon Hansen, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Sonja Taffe, Tracina Jackson-Adams, Bruce Boston, David Kopaska-Merkel -- I could go on and on! Otherwise, not much writing news. No rejections or acceptances coming through -- that's the holidays for you.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 193,600

Words written since last entry:
2,300

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