Not much happening here at Tropism HQ lately. I got a couple of short story rejections (oh, the sting!) and am turning the stories right back around again, because, hey, that's what you do. My fearless agent tells me that contracts for Rangergirl have arrived, and should be sent to me for signing soonish, assuming everything checks out okay.

I'm still reading Wodehouse, and still having a great time, and perhaps even learning something about prose. Who knew intentionally vague descriptions and characters quoting mis-remembered poems could be so funny?

Video game of choice these days is the first Buffy game, which is great fun, very atmospheric, occasionally even scary! The puzzles are too simple, and the gameplay is more linear than I'd like, but it's still engaging.

Our house is no longer mummified in plastic wrap. The painters seem to be mostly done, and our windows were uncovered yesterday. Light, blessed light! Our cat Marzi likes to stare out the window for hours, and she was going nuts during the few days when every single window in the house was blocked -- prowling on the windowsills and mewling piteously. She's happier now, and so am I.

Summer is gearing up. It's going to be a busy one. This weekend is pretty much free, except for a review I need to write. The following weekend is my best friend Scott's bachelor party, which I'm helping to plan, and which should be insane amounts of fun. Two weeks later he gets married down in Santa Cruz, and the following weekend my writing group meets in Pacifica, and a week later Heather and I set off across the continent to visit my family on the North Carolina coast. Then we come back and have a few weeks of relative inactivity before Worldcon! I suspect I shall spend the fall in a state of exhaustion. Except by then I should be hip-deep in novel revisions, or else writing a new book, and exhaustion won't be an option...

On an unrelated note (not that any paragraph in this entry has borne much of a relationship to any other), I've been trying to diet this past week. Not anything fancy, just eating less (I tend to eat a lot, and I eat when I'm bored, both things I'm trying to stop now), and exercise more. I've lost a few pounds already, so it seems to be working. I just have to suppress my impulse to pop down to the Grab n' Stab corner liquor store for a pint of ice cream every night, and stop eating whole pizzas at a sitting...