I'm on vacation, y'all. 9 days straight of not going to work. I actually like my job, but I like having nothing but free time even more. Though I'll be going to the office (read: my boss's house) on Friday for a post-Thanksgiving-day-Thanksgiving-dinner, which should be great. My boss is probably the best cook I know, and his sausage stuffing is worth committing felonies for.

Today Heather and I are going into the city to Borderlands, where Charles de Lint and Sharyn November are signing for the launch of the new Firebirds YA anthology. I've never met Charles, and I'm looking forward to it. His work has been a huge influence on me, and (as I've written here a zillion times, probably) his story "Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair" was one of the stories I read as a teenager that first made me realize there was this thing called contemporary fantasy that I might like to write myself someday. His story collections, especially Dreams Underfoot and The Ivory and the Horn, have had a huge influence on my writing, as have his novels, particularly Memory and Dream and Someplace to Be Flying. Go read 'em, if you haven't. Anyway, I'll take my copy of Triskell Tales for him to sign, and our copy of Firebirds, and maybe chat with him if he has time, and thank him personally for the review he gave Floodwater earlier this year. I'll also try to restrain myself from spending too much money on books at Borderlands. Their horror section always makes me salivate uncontrollably. Well, metaphorically, I mean.

Apart from that, I have no set plans for the coming week, except for writing lots and lots on the Frog novel. I have to get up in the mornings to take Heather to work on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and I plan to return from that, brew a pot of coffee, start some novel-writing music, and get into full-immersion mode. That's what vacations are for, right?

This weekend we have to send out Flytraps, since we got a lot of orders this past week (keep 'em coming!). I'm still waiting on my next shipment of Little Gods, but once they come in, I'll send out copies to the couple of you who still have orders outstanding. Fear not.

Heather and I are in the throes of figuring out our next holiday chapbook. We know which solo stories are going in, but we don't have a collaboration yet -- we've sold all the collaborations we've written! There are worse problems to have, true, but we need to write a good collab this weekend if we're going to finish the chapbook in time for Xmas. We have some ideas, fortunately, and it should be fun.

I'll probably be updating a fair bit during the coming week. So until then, I remain, yr obdnt srvnt, etc.