11:25 a.m.

I'm replying to submissions a lot today. Have rejected a bunch, and put a few aside to think about later. Clearing slush is the morning's work, and in the afternoon I'll work on some fiction, maybe go get some lunch...

Hmm. People are sending me stories about scorpions and ferrets for Flytrap. Coincidence, or do they read my journal and notice my little obsessions?

Gah. My landlady is showing the house today, so there are random people in my apartment with measuring tapes and shit. Kee-rist.

Okay, they were only here for like ten minutes, and then they left. There's termite inspectors here, too. Our house is like ecology, yo. Termites and slugs and mice living together in harmony.

And now there's a baby screaming next door. Kid's got a good setta lungs. Could be an opera singer someday. Makes it a bit hard to concentrate, though...

11:58 a.m.

The interlopers are gone, and my home is my own once again. Yay.

Ah, spoke too soon. A building inspector just arrived. C'est la vie...

I plowed through a lot of subs this morning. I'm caught up on e-mail submissions through September 30th. So if you submitted before that, and you haven't heard from me, it's because I liked your story and put it aside for further consideration, and you probably won't hear from me until after the reading period ends, when I make final selections.

7:14 p.m.

I went out to lunch around 12:30 today, took a walk down to Lakeshore. Gorgeous weather, beautiful walk, listening to This American Life on my ipod. I ate at the Lakeshore café, read Jonathan Strange (I'm about halfway through it), and generally enjoyed the afternoon. Then back home again to do laundry, proofread my Fictionwise galleys (links to follow once they're all online), and work on fiction. I didn't do any new writing, alas, but I did revise the collab I did with Mike and Greg, cutting about a thousand words of extraneous verbiage, streamlining scenes, tweaking and polishing. I'm going to give it another go-through, make final line edits, and send it out sometime in the next day or two. I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Heather's out tonight, seeing her sister dance, so it's a long and somewhat lonely day for me. I normally love hanging out at home in the evenings, but without Heather, it just makes me melancholy and restless. Everything's more fun when she's around. So I'm being good, paying bills, being productive, waiting for her to come home so we can spend a little time together.

Online things: I've been reading the archives of In Passing, which is full of lines I'd love to steal for dialogue. I also think there are structural possibilities for an oddball contemporary fantasy story suggested there... but it would require some intense sustained invention in order to work properly. On the other hand, it would almost certainly have to be very short, and I can often pull off sustained good writing if it's a sprint. Maybe I could do it for the next holiday chapbook...

There's a new episode of Making Fiends, and it's got an awesome good song, which I fully intend to sing on election day. "Vote, vote, vote/ vote, vote, vote/ unless you are a goat/ because goats can't vote..."

7:23 p.m.

We have a new teapot. It whistles. That rocks.