Last night's email brought a rejection from Mary Anne Mohanraj for the Blowing Kisses anthology, so now I need to find a market for this strange little naughty slipstream story. Any suggestions are welcome.

I have a short story due Tuesday, and so I've decided to resurrect one of my Clarion stories. It originally had a Norse mythology theme, but I'm not going that way anymore. At one point, our hero gets bashed in the back of the head, and spends much of the rest of the story trying to recover from the effects. According to this page, concussion symptoms "may include disorientation, confusion, dizziness, amnesia, uncoordinated hand-eye movements and sometimes unconsciousness." This is a good start, but I'm going to put it to you folks out there. Any of you suffered a concussion? What did it feel like? How did it alter your perceptions? The more details, the better. Thanks in advance.

Talked to my lady last night, and she's getting frustrated with the layout of our chapbook. Quark is giving her some pagination problems (numbering the pages so that they all come out in order once assembled and folded over). If anybody out there knows Quark and knows how to fix this, please post in the comments, or email Janet directly. She even got a version of PageMaker today to see if there was a better way to lay this out, but she ran into a whole other batch of problems, like despite using the same fonts, sizes and leading, somehow the chapbook is ten pages smaller, which makes no sense. Again, thanks in advance.

Tomorrow is my birthday! Yay! The big two-eight. I will be spending most of the day at the Duke University PhD Career Symposium, listening to people talk about the possible ways to make a living after earning a PhD in Liberal Arts. Since I'm planning on continuing my education until people will call me Dr. Lundberg (wow, that looks so cool), I think this is a good thing to be going to. Tomorrow night, my parents are taking me to Tripp's for dinner, a place I only go to once a year, on my birthday. I've gone there almost every year since I was in high school, the main reason being that they are the only restaurant I know of who can prepare chicken cordon bleu the way it was meant to be prepared. No one else does it better.

The rest of the weekend, I will be sequestered in my apartment, writing until my fingertips bleed. I have the aforementioned short story to finish, four position papers to revise, and a seven-page paper to write on The Blithedale Romance. I will probably only check email once a day, and may likely turn off my phone. This will be a hellish weekend, but if I have the barest minimum of distractions, I think I can get through it. Wish me luck.

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Now Reading:
The Blithedale Romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Stories Out to Publishers:
5

Books Read This Year:
39

Zines/Fiction Mags Read This Year:
34