Discuss me! Andy Richards set up a discussion topic for me over at The Third Alternative message board! Go ask me embarrassing questions, or argue about the significance of the embedded musical references in "Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters," or make dire predictions about how much my first novel is going to suck, assuming I ever publish one. I'll talk to you, I promise. And there are lots of other thriving discussions on that board, too. Andy wants the board to be a bit more international -- it's mostly Brits who post, including the seemingly ever-present, brilliant, contentious M. John Harrison -- and so Andy's trying to stir things up a bit.

I only wrote a thousand words of the new story tonight. But since I didn't start working until midnight, I guess that's not too bad. I'd originally thought the story would run about 5,000 words total, but, as so often seems to be the case lately, I underestimated. I'm at 4200 words now, and it'll take another couple of thousand at least to get the to the end. I'm going to try to keep it around 6K, but we'll see. It'll be as long as it needs to be, I guess. I'd just like to write something that's not a novelette once in a while.

As Heather mentioned, the cats have a fungus. Tonight we doused them in a solution of lime sulphur. I don't know about the lime, but the presence of the sulphur's pretty obvious -- the stuff is yellow and stinks like the hell where bad eggs go when they die. So we held the cats in the bathtub and sponged the stuff all over them. Zanzi was very good, Marzi slightly less so -- she gave me a couple of punctures in the crook of my elbow. Now we're all done... until next week. And for the following six weeks. We have to do this weekly for 2 months. It's supposed to keep the fungus from spreading, and prevent them from passing it back and forth. And in the meantime, they stink, and everything they touch stinks, and the bathroom stinks, and it pretty much sucks.

Sometimes life is very disgusting.

I did some stuff for Little Gods today, writing up the tip sheet that gets sent out with review copies (which should be going out soon). I found out that the hardcover will be out in November, and the trade paperback will be out... sometime after that. Not sure when, but it'll be months later. So those of you who are holding out for the cheaper option will have to wait, I'm afraid. But why not buy the hardcover? Go for the gravitas! Shocklines has it available to pre-order for only $26.95, $3 off the cover price. If nothing else, you can put it on your Xmas lists, right? Right. And the trade paperback will be along, fear not.

Otherwise, not much going on. It was rainy today, a nice strange change in the weather. Work is fine. Food is plentiful. My chair is comfy. Fungus aside, things are good.