Man, what a night! We had to take our cat to the emergency vet to get her eye checked out after she got some ear-mite medication in there. We tried washing it out, but we weren't sure if that would've helped too much, so off to the vet we went. They flushed both eyes and cleaned her ears, and we came away with more medication. She seems to be okay now, although her right eye is still a bit squinty.

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Last night we finished watching The City of Lost Children, although Carrie was too tired to watch the last hour. I tried summarizing it for her this morning, but it's like trying to explain a weird dream that makes perfect sense when you're in the midst of it, but seems like absolute nonsense when you think it over some more. I won't bother trying to summarize the plot here, either - I reckon the word 'surreal' sums it up pretty well!

The visuals are quite striking, with lots of colour and strange cityscapes. It reminded me a lot of Dark City in terms of the overall style, ideas, and the strange environments presented. The acting varied, but seemed to work overall. Ron Perlman (who stars in the just released comic book movie, Hellboy) plays a circus strongman named 'One' who is searching for his little brother, and who comes across a variety of strange and sinister characters in his travels. The movie is entirely in French, with subtitles. The region 1 (US) release does have an English language track, but I preferred the original French - I always get a headache when the dubbed English doesn't sync properly with the lip movements of the actors!

The City of Lost Children is definitely an acquired taste, recommended for fans of unconventional French cinema, or the work of Terry Gilliam, which is of a similar nature.

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Today I had a few good ideas for the collab story, entitled Lifetime Guarantee, that I'm working on with a friend in Australia. I was really stumped after getting the first part and I kept putting off working on it as other things hopped onto my plate. It has been in a state of suspended animation for over a month now! I thought about it some more this morning and I reckon I might have a possible direction for it. Fingers crossed!

While browsing the Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine site today, I noticed they had a special June issue themed around the new Stephen King movie, Secret Window (which I saw a few weeks back). In case you haven't seen it, Depp's character is a writer who has trouble with an obsessed man claiming that he stole his story. Said story was supposedly published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, hence the movie to mag tie-in. The interviews and author line-up sounded interesting, so I ordered a copy of that issue plus one of their $1 mystery samplers (a random selection of 3 Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery mags). I've read precious little mystery genre short fiction, and very little mystery in general, aside from some Agatha Christie novels years ago. I'll be interested to see how this compares with the short SF and Fantasy I read all the time :)

I signed up for Bruce Holland Rogers' short-short story mailing list the other day, after reading about it on Jay Lake's discussion board awhile back. Bruce is a pro-writer who has published stories in Analog and Realms of Fantasy, among others. For five bucks a year (payable via Paypal), you get a short-short story by Bruce in your inbox 3 times a month. Stories are typically between 200 and 2,500 words long. The first story of my subscription arrived today, which was actually 3 microfiction pieces of 69 words each (so-called 69-ers). They were quite good. I'm looking forward to seeing what Bruce comes up with over the next year!

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I finally got around to finishing reading the September 2003 issue of F&SF today. This was an impressive issue with a great line-up of stories. My favourite stories this issue were Alex Irvine's Pictures from an Expedition (near-future manned Mars mission), Bret Bertholf's Alfred Bester is Alive and Well and Living in Winterset, Iowa (a surreal and inventive homage to the mind-bending fiction of Alfred Bester, complete with illustrations), and Esther M. Friesner's I Killed them in Vegas (a fun vampire as stand-up comedian tale). Once I've read the remaining two issues for 2003, I'll see if I can put together an F&SF "best of 2003" entry as I did for Asimov's in an earlier entry.

2004 Stats:

Total submissions:	6
Total acceptances:	0
Total rejections:	5
Waiting for response:	3
Books read:	5
Fiction Mags/Chapbooks read:	8

What I'm Reading:
More Tomorrow and Other Stories by Michael Marshall Smith
The Well-Fed Writer by Peter Bowerman
Locus, March 2004
The Third Alternative, Issue#36