So I turned 27 yesterday.

Another grim reminder of the way the years before the blinking red light on my wrist go off are slipping away like sands in an hourglass in the cruel and relentless forward march of time. Sooner or later, everyone will be 30 and, then, eventually, what's much the same thing, dead.

Fortunately, I have friends to comfort me on such ominous ocassions and help me drink away the pain. Also fortunately, Miami is well-equipped with outdoor bars, beautiful beaches and other appropriately pleasant backdrops for this activity. We also went out to eat a nice Indian restaurant in South Beach, and there was a bottle of 17-year-old Bowmore in the mix at one point later in the evening, so I was a happy camper.

And, long-distance via the magic of Amazon, Steph made the whole couple of days much better with a book called "Glass Houses: The Morganville Vampires, Book I" by Rachel Caine, which I started up shortly after it arrived on Thursday and finished first thing Saturday morning. (Also "Four and Twenty Blackbirds" by Cherie Priest, which I haven't gotten a chance to dip into yet but which looks cool.) I was touch and go for a long time on Thursday, since I sort of wanted to finish reading the stuff I'm actually getting paid to read first, but I succumbed to temptation pretty quickly. It's exactly my kind of thing. Vampires that are actually meant to be scary instead of sexy, normal people in p.o.v. instead of superheroes, etc., etc., etc. Sheer unadulterated guilty pleasure. And good research if I ever actually try to write some YA, which is a thought that keeps on crossing my mind.

And the lovely and terrifyingly perceptive Tinatsu got me "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman and "The Starving Students' Vegetarian Cookbook" (not by Joe Haldeman.)

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Also, the night before, my housmate and another friend took me out to see "Grindhouse," which was a thing of beauty. If you like Tarantino, or Rodriguez, or the cheesy 1970s horror and exploitation films they're riffing off of, then you'll like this. If all three, you'll love it. In particular, the previews for non-existent coming attractions were fantastic.

The Tarantino half even included some of the characters planning on picking up some burgers at Big Kahuna Burger. Need I say more?

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Since my last blog entry (bless me, father, for I have sinned...it's been 21 days since my last entry), I finished the 9/11 story and started a new story (Miami-based, horror, an idea I've been kicking around for a while.) The 9/11 thing was the fifth story since Clarion, which is a strange, minor landmark. At this point, I've officially written as much since the end of July 2006 as I did in the previous six weeks.

....yay?

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Oh, and I would post my WisCon schedule, since they were supposed to be sent out this week, but I still haven't gotten mine. I do know, since I was contacted by the moderator, that I'm on a panel about the contrast between the Rapture and the secularized SFnal version of the same that is the Singularity. Should be fun.