I like the chuckling sound wine makes, when you pour a glass too fast from a new bottle. I'm drinking a slightly sweet, fruity Shiraz now, because I'm feeling strangely jangly and want myself to mellow as midnight passes by. It's working.

I'm sitting here at my desk, midnight having just swooped past, reading through Say... Aren't You Dead?, which arrived in the mail today. "What We're Going to Do Next" by Jennifer Rachel Baumer is quite nice, but because it reminded me so immediately of both House of Leaves and The Cipher it suffers a bit by comparison; but taken solely on its own merits, it's an effectively creepy piece. Barth Anderson's "Seasons of the Beast" is dark and odd. He is, certainly, one of the best new writers to emerge in recent years. Scott Westerfeld's "That Which Does Not Kill Us" is well-written and engaging, which is to be expected. It's a reprint from an Australian anthology, and I actually read it there quite some time ago, because we got a copy at A Certain Magazine, but I imagine it's new to most of the non-antipodean audience. That's as far as I've gotten so far. I like this zine.

Toby has good news. I went to Clarion with him, and his dedication and passion impressed me then; those qualities have only grown in recent years. He's worked hard, and he deserves success. Let's hope he's on the cusp of wonderful things.

We finished work on the January issue of A Certain Magazine today, and I'm pretty beat tonight. It took us all day to get everything done, but we did, and it went off to the printer. It's a good issue, I think, with a special YA section with articles from Garth Nix, Sharyn November, and our own YA-expert Carolyn Cushman. There's a nice big World Fantasy Awards photo spread, for which I did the layout. And in the editorial, you get to read the strange saga of my amazing disappearing birthday cake. Anyway, all that work pretty well ruined me for computer-stuff tonight (though here I am now, of course). Heather and I went out to get burritos for dinner, then came home and lolled about and frolicked and lolled further. I took a nap while she played The Sims, and woke when she came to kiss me good night. Since then I've been puttering, answering old e-mail, reading. I tried to work on the Frog novel, which is presently suffering retrograde motion. I had to back up about 70 pages so I can write a long scene to set up stuff that's going to happen later. It will be a fun, cool, momentum-building scene, but I have to file down the edges and cover the seams and make sure it doesn’t read like something inserted at a later date. Which is what it is, of course. This isn't difficult, but it is a bit tedious, and I'm too tired to deal with it tonight, so I haven't written a word of fiction. I expect I'll be rather less exhausted tomorrow, though, and I'll get back into it then. I've been plunking away steadily, doing a few (or several) pages a night, making progress. It's still fun. I should have it ready to go to first readers sometime in January, barring the unforeseen.

I had a fine birthday/weekend. I ate many caterpillar rolls at our favorite sushi restaurant. Hot-tubbing in the rain. A weekend of walking up and down around Berkeley with Heather, doing shopping, holding hands. We printed our holiday chapbook -- Wintering Away -- and it's beautiful, though we have yet to mail them out. It's okay for holiday cards to come late, though, right? It's been a good week, too, actually. I got a raise, and got a bonus (the latter should pay for the next issue of Flytrap easily, and the former will help ease the grip of the grim specter of debt), and things are all-in-all rather good. Heather has some enticing possibilities opening up. The year is ending well. There are two successive four-day weekends in my future. There are presents, and good meals, and good books to read. We will see family (well, Heather's family) and friends. We will keep in from the cold.