Completion! On my lunch break today I finished proofreading Rangergirl. Not a lot of errors, really. Some typos, some omitted words, and two or three instances of infelicitous prose I took the opportunity to correct. So I'll package up the sheaf of corrected pages and Fed Ex 'em off tomorrow, a whole couple days early. I hope they love me over there at Bantam, because I'm the freakin' Turnaround Kid.

I think I like the book. There are moments in the book I love, where I get a little frisson even after reading it for the millionth time, so that's a good sign, and overall, yeah, I like it. I figured by this point in the editorial process I would loathe the monstrous thing, but I'm still quite fond of it.

Life is otherwise good! I'm healthy, and Heather's pretty much healthy. The war with the ants is at the very least a draw. I managed to clean the kitchen last night (on a weeknight! extraordinary!), so it's less of a bug-magnet now. Today we finished the latest issue of A Certain Magazine, so my stress level overall is lessened considerably for a couple of weeks. I get to dive back into the Bridge novel soon, now that my Rangergirl duties are done, which is very exciting. I've been thinking a lot about the book, questioning a lot of my assumptions about ghost stories and fantasy in general, and realizing that some of my assumptions are stupid, and should thus be overturned. And they will be.

Steph Burgis was asking writers to post lists of fun things they like to put in books, over in her comments section. Here's my list:

1. Giant robots.

2. Poisonous frogs.

3. People embodying archetypal qualities.

4. Sympathetic and contagious magic.

5. Bridges.

I think it's equally interesting to list things I don't like in books, and that you will probably never see in a book from me (at least, not treated in a respectful or straightforward way). Here's my list:

1. Destiny/Fate/A "Chosen One"

2. Dead people coming back to life and being good as new; consequence-free resurrections. If you come back from the dead in my stories, you'll come back changed.

3. The notion of "One True Love" presented as something that actually exists.

4. Math. Except in that cool M. John Harrison/Christopher Rowe way where "the math" or "the mathematics" is a shorthand way to describe insanely complex technological/computational processes. And I'd probably be too self-conscious to even do something like that when they've done it better.

5. Southerners depicted as uniformly brutal/stupid/homosexual rapists/cannibals.

Hmm. I suspect I could go on and on. Do y'all have things you hate seeing in books, that you'll sure as hell never put in your own books?