Another very productive weekend, though right now I feel very much like I'm being pulled in eighteen directions at once. My big goal this weekend was to finish writing "Last Fare", which I started over a month ago in Bali, in time to email to Forrest Aguirre for Leviathan 4. I had a little over 2000 words left to go, but I was determined.

This was also the weekend my parents were going to the beach, as well as the wedding of a good friend. I felt like I got absolutely no rest. Saturday morning I got up early, drove the half-hour to my parents' house in Fuquay-Varina, and fed the bunny and let him run around a little bit. I left at noon, drove straight to the Borders near my apt (I'd brought my laptop with me), took a quick peek at the magazines, then settled into the cafe around 12:30. Three hours later, the story was finished, and with an ending that surprised even me. But it was at 4900 words, 100 shy of the Lev4 minimum. By then it was 3:30, and I had to go home to get ready for the wedding, so I packed everything up and figured I'd get to it later that night.

I got cleaned up and duded up, then drove to the wedding in downtown Raleigh, at an enormous Methodist church with arched ceilings, stained-glass windows, and the longest aisle I've ever seen in a church. One of my best friends was the best man, and another good friend was a groomsmen, so there were a few people I knew there, which was nice. After the wedding, we drove four or five blocks to the downtown Sheraton for the reception, which was incredible. They spent mucho dinero on that sucker. There must have been 250 people there. I left at 9:30, drove back to Fuquay, fed the bunny, and tried not to let my allergies affect me. I was only able to stay there for twenty minutes before I had to leave, and I had a big-time asthma attack on the way home, which had never happened before. When I got home, I tinkered with the story a little more, tricking it out to something like 4978 words, which I could with all certainty round up to 5000. I emailed the story to my wonderful lady, then went to bed.

Woke up early again the next morning, back to Fuquay, fed the bunny, chased him around the living room for five minutes until he would go back in his cage, then went home. I had lunch with my friend John to discuss living in a townhouse together, and how that would be affected after Janet and I get married. Afterward, I got an email from Janet with some great comments and glowing praise on the story, which I immediately put to use. I let the story cool for a little while and finished up The Kappa Child by Hiromi Goto (which was just beautiful, and deserves the awards it garnered). I watched a little tv, got some dinner. True Lies was on FOX, and it was a lot funnier than I remembered. 10:00 I sat back down at the laptop, made some minor final tweaks to push it up to 5400 words, and emailed it off to Mr. Aguirre. Whew. No wonder I'm tired right now.

By the way, big congrats to Nick Mamatas for selling his first novel Move Under Ground to Night Shade! And while I'm congratulating, here's to Tim Pratt for his new collection Little Gods, coming out from Prime Books; to Ol' Mike Jasper and Greg van Eekhout for their collab "California King" coming out in Asimov's; and to Jon Hansen for his poem "The Laundromat Advances the Plot" coming out in Strange Horizons! I feel more successful just knowing these cool people.

I just started my ARC of Small Beer Press's new anthology Trampoline, edited by the inimitable Kelly Link. I'm enjoying the stories so far; I skipped ahead and read Richard Butner's "Ash City Stomp" (the story which inspired the cover art by Shelley Jackson), which, along with "Drifting" (his new story in Say... #2) are the best stories I've seen from him. ("Horses Blow Up Dog City" in the Intersections antho a few years ago was also good.) Christopher Rowe's and Ed Park's stories are good ones to lead off the anthology, and I look forward to the rest. This will be a fun one to review.

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Now Reading:
Trampoline edited by Kelly Link

Stories Out to Publishers:
14

Books Read This Year:
25

Novel Word Count:
9200