Yeehaw! I just got an email this morning from the fine folks at Eggplant Literary Productions' Library, accepting "Jury Duty" for their online fake library! Woo hoo! They sent me a contract and everything! I've been dancing in my chair for about an hour. They didn't indicate when it would be published on their site, but when I find out, I'll post it here. The Library is a neat sort-of Borgesian invention, full of fictional excerpts of books that never were. I wrote "Jury Duty" while waiting for, naturally, jury duty earlier this year, and I rather like it a lot. Yay!

Because of the big blackout yesterday in New York, which stretched as far as Michigan and Ohio and up into Canada, my sister, who lives in NYC, had to walk all the way home to her ex-boyfriend's apartment (where she's been temporarily staying until, well, today) from her job in midtown Manhattan. When the power went down, people immediately thought it was another terrorist attack, and she was told to evacuate the building. In her haste, she left behind her tennis shoes, and had to walk in her heels down five flights of stairs in her office, thirty minutes on the city streets, and up eight flights in the apartment building. Today, she's supposed to be moving to a new apartment in Brooklyn, so it's kinda good the outage happened yesterday instead of next week, when she'd have to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge to get home. My mother got a hold of her last night, and she's doing fine.

Last night was busy. After getting home following a badly-needed haircut, I worked on and finished my music review of Kyler's new album. I also (responding to a call for volunteers) double checked the encryption on a piece within the forthcoming Pan Macmillan edition of City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer. It was cool getting to decrypt Jeff's story, like working out a secret code when you're a kid. My eyes were way tired when I had finished, but it was fun. Plus, he's giving me a copy of the PanMac edition in March 2004 as a thank-you, so it was definitely worth it.

This article from the New York Times makes me sad. Apparently the market in the US for translated fiction just sucks at the moment, which is a pity. Even University Presses aren't able to financially justify publishing fiction from other countries. Some of the best novels and stories I've read recently were translated from another language: Time-Gifts by Zoran Zivkovic, Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer, Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. It's a sad state of affairs when a country that is supposed to be a giant mixing bowl of cultures has become so insular. So go check some of these works out.

Not much going on this weekend. I need to write one more music review, and try to get going on a non-fiction paper. I may try to see a movie, since I do need to get out of the apartment for a while. There's a grad student information fair this afternoon that I might go to, and other orientation stuff Monday and Tuesday. Holy monkey, classes start next Wednesday! Woo! I can't wait! Master's program, here I come!

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Now Reading:
Viriconium by M John Harrison

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