Summer colds suck. I woke up yesterday morning with my nose full of phlegm, dripping in a steady trickle down my cheek. My head was pounding and I coughed hard enough to make my lungs rattle. Needless to say, I didn't go to work.

I slept in until 11:30, watched a little crappy daytime tv, finished reading Kalpa Imperial (which you should all buy in August), put in the Animatrix DVD and watched the entire thing, rearranged my trade paperback bookcase, wrote the Kalpa section of my Small Beer Press review, and emailed my lady. For all I did, it felt like a day wasted. Go figure.

I was feeling better in the evening, so I drove down to The Regulator Bookshop on 9th Street in Durham, and after spending five minutes trying to find a parking space, and having to cram into a parallel spot a block away, went inside. The Regulator is a cool independent bookstore, surviving by its proximity to Duke University and the fact that it's a cool independent bookstore. I briefly looked around at the magazines and moleskine notebooks (they only had the sketchbooks, not the lined notebooks, dangit), then headed downstairs where close to a hundred people were squashed together in little uncomfortable plastic chairs. I managed to find an empty one in the second row, put my books in it to save my spot, and got a mocha from the coffee bar to the left. A few minutes later, Zadie Smith, came walking down the stairs, and hopped up to the podium; the guy who was sort of in charge was stuck behind a bunch of people, trying to find them seats, and blurted out, "Zadie Smith, everybody!" We clapped, and she seemed a bit embarrassed at the attention.

She read two passages from The Autograph Man in her husky British accent, and both were funny and witty. She even managed to do pretty good American and German accents during the reading. After that, the floor was thrown open to questions. Most people asked about her first novel White Teeth, which became a bestseller and was apparently made into a PBS movie, but a few questions were about her atheist childhood, musical influences (both her brothers are rappers), and having dinner with Salman Rushdie. Then she moved down to a counter for the signing, and everyone queued up to get autographs. I got my hardcover copies of both her novels signed, then left. It was fun.

I was thinking about a few things on the way home. Smith is my age, born in 1975 like me, and she already has two major novels under her belt. I really need to get on my own novel. And there were a couple of questions that popped into my brain about fifteen minutes too late: because of the success of her first novel, did she have any sophomore jitters associated with the new book? and how in the world did she get lucky enough not to have illustrations on her covers? I'm a little torn on this last issue, because I like book covers, and the layout and design that goes into making a good one. When a cover is good, it's damn good. But when a cover is clumsy, or misrepresentative of the material inside, I think they actually do more harm than good. I'd rather have no cover art than bad cover art.

Also on the way home, I got treated to a spectacular lightning show. Streaks forked across the sky one after the other, some touching down. It was incredible. For the entire half-hour drive home, the sky was lit up by electrical sparks, with only the slightest bit of rain on my windshield. At one point, a gigantic rainbow appeared, a full semicircle that must have been ten or twenty miles in diameter. On the other side of the sky, the sun was setting behind clouds, and everything was turned a deep red, like a duotone.

I got online once I reached home and logged into the HWA chat with China Mieville, only Mieville didn't show up. He's teaching at Clarion West this week, and apparently was needed to introduce or be there with Ursula K. Le Guin, who had decided to show up as a surprise. Man, those Westies are lucky this year. So anyway, the chat was an interview with an author of a vampire series that I wasn't terribly interested in, and thunder started booming again outside my window, so I turned off my laptop and unplugged it from the wall to prevent against power surges.

I called Janet at 10:00 and had a lovely hour-long chat as always, missing her even more since I could hear her voice. Our phone calls always seem to end too soon, and we said good night (or in her case, good morning) at 11:00. I sat up in bed for a while, reading from Viriconium by M John Harrison, turning off the light around midnight. And here I am at work today, feeling a little better, though still run-down.

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Now Reading:
Viriconium by M John Harrison

Stories Out to Publishers:
16

Books Read This Year:
27

Novel Word Count:
9200