I'm really enjoying Graham Joyce's The Facts of Life now; after a somewhat slow opening, which is surprising for him (or it could've been me, not having much of a brain to read the past few weeks), I'm sucked into this book. It's set in Coventry, England, in the years after World War II, and not only is it filled with wonderful characters (and a lot of 'em) and some nicely done bits of magic, but I feel like I'm learning a lot about the world of 1945-1950 in that part of the world. Great stuff, and a textbook case of how to write historical fiction.

Which comes in handy, as I'm revising a novel that's in that same genre, with the same amount of slipstream-y "magic" in it (just a tiny bit, no wizards or aliens to be seen!). I'm always inspired, reading good fiction.

So inspired that I finished up my dirty dozen list of agents today, and either tonight or tomorrow I'll fix up my query letter and print off my synopsis and try to get all my envelopes and stamps and mailing labels put together so I can mail off all 12 queries for the baseball novel tomorrow. That's the plan, at least...

Meanwhile, I'll try my best not to go over the first 3 chapters over and over, tweaking and tweaking. Especially for chapter 1, I'm at the point where I'll make an edit on Monday, then on Tuesday I'lll change that edit back to the way it was on Sunday. That's a good sign that I'm done with that chapter, I'd say.

And I almost forgot -- you have to go get Electric Velocipede 10 and read Jeffrey Ford's crazy "The Way He Does It," which I read last night. Great stuff, and he manages to keep up the weirdness all the way to the end. While you're at the EV site, why don'tcha buy a subscription, eh?

And now lunch is over and I'm off to an hour and a half meeting. Later!