I drive through a canyon on the way to work every day, and there's a little park on one side. There's an Earth Day celebration being held there, and several signs advertising the fact, all of which promise "Fun, Nature, Goats and Fire Safety!"

If that doesn't sound like a party, I don't know what does.

I wrote about 2000 words of the Koontz essay yesterday. I am zooming merrily along. (Well, not really "merrily.") I also had a nice lunch with Susan, and did some shopping. I was a marvelous little consumer. I bought the first two seasons of The Office on DVD, the new Modest Mouse CD, and the latest collected volumes of Y: The Last Man and Fables. I read the latter two last night, and both were enjoyable. We've started watching The Office, which I quite like, but which makes Heather squirm a bit -- I think the comedy's a little too black for her tastes, and perhaps a subject like the horrors of the workplace hits too close to home for her, as she's had many worse experiences in offices than I have...

Bluejack has a nice review of my story "Terrible Ones" up at The Internet Review of Science Fiction. Requires a subscription to get in, but subscriptions are free until June, so why not sign up? There's some other good stuff there, including an interview with Gordon van Gelder. Here's the concluding bit of the review: "Not only is this a highly entertaining story with some laugh-out-loud humor along the way, it also becomes a surprisingly moving paean to story itself. Even though you think you know where the story is going, Pratt turns the thematic material on its head in the climactic scene, sucker-punching the reader with a powerful philosophy of the importance -- and ethics -- of storytelling."

I'm pleased to find that, in this reviewer's eyes at least, I accomplished what I set out to do.