Okay, I'm kicking off the new schedule again, with January almost behind us already. Got up at 4:45, got the computer warmed up (my old workbeast, still running Windows 98, takes a good five minutes to boot), got the coffee brewing, threw the cat outside, launched MS Work (which takes another minute or so), let the cat back in from the 20-degree cold and threw some food down for him, fixed a big-ass mug of joe, and by 5 a.m. I was knee deep in novel revising.

The trick to getting up at the crack of dawn is to have a plan of attack in mind. Something more specific than "revise the novel." I had 2-3 items I wanted to fix or add to the book, including all my research notes from the two books about WWI and the 1910s I skimmed this weekend. I also wanted to have my protagonist swear off chewing tobacco in chapter 2. Fun stuff like that.

I finished up 'round 6:20, two mugs of coffee later, and dashed off to the good ol' YMCA (you know, that place we've been paying to use but not been using for the past, oh, six months!!!). This was the new element in my schedule, and I've been putting off going for a looong time. I always justified not going by saying I was too tired or too busy.

But now that Mr. Drew has been sleeping better and better at night (he woke at 1 a.m. and then again around 6 a.m., after taking a good hour or two to get to sleep last night), I can't use the excuse of being tired anymore. We'll see if I zonk out this afternoon at work, after lunch...

In other news, not only is Tangent Online back, and looking quite slick and professional, but they have a fine review of Interzone 195 up! Reviewer Sherwood Smith had this, among other things, to say about my tale, "Redemption, Drawing Near":

Readers familiar with Jasper's superb collection Gunning for the Buddha will realize that this is the first story in Jasper's series of otherwise stand-alone tales about Earth being visited by the Wannoshay, aliens from a dying world who fled here in desperation. Father Jasper [ah, should be Joshua, actually -- I've not been to the seminary!] tries, desperately, to comprehend these aliens, who are not even remotely humans in rubber masks; Jasper does an excellent job of depicting believable aliens.

Nice! I like that "superb" word used in conjunction with my story collection! That's another reason to get up at the crack of dawn -- positive feedback on my fiction. Later!