Lord, I love having these alternating Wednesdays off. A free day in the middle of the week is so amazingly good for me.

I rose relatively early this morning (though later than usual for a weekday) and took Heather to BART. Then I headed back home and did some final tweaks to Flytrap, fixing some typos, changing a couple of the marginalia notes to make them more clever/obscure/self-indulgent, and making sure everything was in its right place. I'm sure I'll see errors as soon as I get finished copies, but as of this morning, I thought it looked pretty good.

By 10:30 I was out the door. Went over to Elmwood (a neighborhood in Berkeley, for y'all non-locals) and deposited my paycheck, then went to get a haircut. My hair is now as short as it's been in many years, about chin length, just barely long enough to pull back. I look like a pudgy skater kid. It's a lot more comfortable. The long hair was starting to bother me, as hot as it's been lately (mid-80s, which is hot for here -- and I know, Greg, the desert is baking you alive, it's 110 degrees, I know, I feel for you).

Then I headed to downtown Berkeley and took Flytrap to the printer, and talked to the nice and knowledgeable desktop publishing guy. We should have finished copies in hand by Monday night. Whoo! The price-per-copy is more than we paid for issue #1, but since we don't have to pay shipping costs this time, it works out to be roughly the same. If you haven't subscribed, go subscribe already! We gots bills and contributors and postage to pay, people. And there's a hell of a lot of fabulous fiction in this issue, and some rockin' good poetry, and awesome illustrations by Richard Doyle, Dan Oden, and Andy Miller, and some great essays -- seriously, this is some good 'zine we're talking about.

Okay, huckster moment over.

Because the weather was gorgeous, I ambled through Berkeley's campus, and enjoyed the trees and the shade, and the beautiful women walking past. I had lunch in a courtyard behind a restaurant, and drank a beer (it was almost noon by then...), then hit the bookstores. Didn't buy too much -- the third volume of the Fables comic, the first volume of the collected Lucifer (I'm generally dubious about Sandman spin-offs, but I've liked some of Mike Carey's writing, so it's worth a try), and Karen Joy Fowler's new Jane Austen Book Club. She's doing a signing at Cody's this Saturday, but I think I'm having dinner with David Moles (a Flytrap contributor!) that day, so I don't know if I'll be able to make it. Which is okay, as I'll see her at Wiscon in a few weeks (at least, I assume she's going).

Then I came home, and was back before 2 p.m. -- I've got the whole afternoon ahead of me! I am now, officially, caught up on all extra-fictional commitments. I've got nothing to do for a while now but write stories, and I'm delighted. I have two more stories to revise, and this afternoon I've started writing a new one. All is well.