Saturday, 6:00 p.m.

My review of The Fourth Circle by Zoran Živković? It's done. It's an amazingly great book, really. If you love alternate-universe Sherlock Holmes pastiches, the internal monologues and sexual misadventures of a cross-dimensional Stephen Hawking analogue, scholars selling their souls to the devil to learn the value of pi, snarky female AIs who dream, sexually-repressed Medieval artist's assistants, cheeky monkeys, excellent writing, a total mastery of point-of-view, and decidedly science fictional metaphysics, this is the book for you. It's gonna be on my best of the year list for 2004, that's for sure. There were moments during the course of reading this book that I had my doubts about its chances of success, but in the end, it comes together beautifully -- I was in the hands of a master all along.

So Star*Line is done, and my book review is done. Nothing left but Koontz. I'll work on it tonight, maybe, when we get back from Susan's, and I'll certainly spend time on it tomorrow. Details will follow.

Sunday, 6:00 p.m.

The Koontz essay is done! The first draft, anyway. I wrote about 3200 words of it today, much of that while sitting on the patio behind the house, drinking beer. The essay is about 500 words too long right now, but that'll wash out in revision fairly easily, since my prose tends to be flabby in first drafts. I'll polish it up this week. This is a huge weight off me -- I've been devoting a lot of psychic attention to this essay lately, and I'm glad the hard part is done.

It's been a pleasant weekend, all told, despite doing lots of work. Yesterday I did Star*Line and the Živković essay. Spent much of the afternoon on Piedmont Ave. Heather was having a much-delayed birthday massage there, and I entertained myself with bookstore browsing, having lunch, and reading on a bench in the flat-out lovely weather. Yesterday evening Susan and Matt had us over for a fine meal and a few hands of poker, which was great fun. Today Heather and I rose very early (before 9 a.m.! We blame the chirping birds) and went grocery shopping around 10, loading up on food for the week. Heather's started cooking lately, which is wonderful. Then home for an afternoon of writing and laundry and writing and washing dishes and writing. Heather's been working on reviews for Flytrap. Which is the other not-fiction-writing thing I have to work on lately, but it should be done and at the printer in a week or so. This has been an insanely busy month, but it seems to be winding down to manageable levels, and none too soon.

Otherwise... I'm reading The Briar King by Keyes, which is supposedly good epic fantasy. I've only just started it, but it's not bad so far.