Four Seasons in One Day is coming along nicely. I emailed my fictions to my lady (whose website is currently down) a couple of days ago, and she inserted the current (but soon to be revised) version of her story and found out a page count in Quark. It looks like with Book Antiqua (which will be a nice font for the chapbook) we're going to be around 32 saddle-stiched A5 pages long. Which seems like a pretty decent size for our first attempt into the world of publishing.

My question for those of you out there who've recently produced chapbooks or zines of your own is: how much did it cost? Right now, we're pretty sure we'll be getting it printed in Singapore, but we want to compare prices. We also would like to put a color cover on this bad boy. (I appreciate Nick's suggestion that we just steal the office supplies and copier time from work, but we're not going that way.)

Speaking of Nick, I started his strange hybrid book 3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once a couple of nights ago and haven't been able to put it down. I got the book as a prize from a random drawing of the folks who donated to the June Strange Horizons fund drive, and it just came this Monday. You don't even want to know what he inscribed in it along with his signature, but I will say that he filled up the front two pages of the book with his informative inscription. I told Nick that I'd probably be taking a break from reviewing for a while, but after plowing through the first two-thirds of his book in two days, I'm going to propose reviewing it for Green Man Review, and will most likely write the review this weekend so that it won't interfere with upcoming school papers. So far it's a really fast read, and I want to tell other people about it.

I was happy to find out from the blogs of Jon Hansen and Charlie Stross that I wasn't the only one getting craploads of spam the past few days. My dialup at home is spotty at best nowadays, and the influx of messages with .pif attachments was really pissing me off. It seems to have stopped, however.

My sister told me on the phone not too long ago that I tend to have a fairly negative attitude in this journal, which surprised me. I consider myself an optimist, and someone who likes to smile and laugh a lot, but things do bother me, and when they do, I go straight to the journal and rant and rave and get it out of my system. Journaling, like fiction writing, is a form of therapy. As I've gotten older and more concerned with the world outside my own little confines, I've become more aware of world events and politics, and I get riled up a lot more than I used to. I was talking to a coworker yesterday about this, and he agreed that it's a function of getting older and worrying how these events will affect you and your livelihood.

So I'll continue to talk about things that bother me, or astound me, or piss me off, and I apologize to my sister in advance. This journal is an increasingly-important outlet for frustration and indignation, and I would find it hard not being able to continue to write in it.

I will leave you now by telling you about my first two days of school. Monday-Wednesday-Friday is American Romanticism, with authors like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, etc. I discovered yesterday morning how subversive and anti-establishment these guys really were, and still are. Tuesday nights is a Fiction Writing Workshop with the young Dr. Kessel, which, though I've taken the class already as an undergraduate, should be fun. Tuesday-Thursday is Literary Postmodernism, with authors like DeLillo, Rushdie, Forché, Barthes, etc. I'm going to enjoy the hell out of this class; at some point, I'll have to recommend JeffV's City of Saints and Madmen to my professor since it's coming out soon in trade paperback and would be affordable for future classes. It feels so great being back on campus, surrounded by academia, caught up in the energy of new students. I'm more convinced than ever that this is what I'm meant to be doing.

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Now Reading:
3000 MPH in Every Direction at Once by Nick Mamatas

Stories Out to Publishers:
7

Books Read This Year:
29

Zines/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
31