So. Good things. Today I got my contributor copy of the UK edition of The Mammoth Book of Sorcerer's Tales, which is cool. Editor Mike Ashley says a couple of nice things about "The Witch's Bicycle." My favorite part goes "The title... may conjure up an image of the wonderful Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West at the start of the 1939 film version of The Wizard of Oz, but no matter how nasty you thought she was, the witch in the following story is a thousand times more evil."

One thousand times more evil. That's awesome.

The last couple of days have pretty much sucked.

I worked until 7 p.m. on Wednesday. Which wouldn't have been so bad... except InDesign crashed at the end of the day, and was unable to recover the file I was working on, and the last save was corrupted and unsalvageable. So I lost the whole day's work on the magazine. I had to start over this morning from the previous day's backup. Sucked.

This morning sucked even before that, though. I was driving Heather to the BART station, headed down the hill to Park Blvd. It's kind of a narrow street anyway, with cars parked on both sides, and at the moment there's a big-ass RV parked on one side of the street. Another car was coming up the hill as I was going down it. The driver stopped right next to the giant RV to let me past. I attempted to squeak through the narrow gap, which looked big enough... and didn't quite make it. The horrible, horrible sound of my fiberglass car scraping against her fiberglass car ensued. I stopped, she stopped, she was pissed, I was mortified, we exchanged phone numbers. Not much damage, just a little paint scraped on her fender. Our car's fine. She's going to get an estimate to fix the paint job and let me know, probably tomorrow night. I'll see how much it's going to be, then decide if I'm just going to pay out of pocket or deal with the insurance company. I've never been in an accident, even a minor little fender-bender like this, so am basically groping along with no idea how to proceed. It's my fault, and I'm willing to do the right thing and pay for the repairs, but if she decides she wants to get her whole car repainted over this or something... hell. It sucks. I'm all stressed about it, too. I deal badly with uncertainty, and not knowing how much this is going to cost me -- either in direct money or jacked-up insurance rates -- makes me anxious. Ah, well. There are other annoying things, too, more trivial ones. C'est la vie. I remind myself that all my current problems and stresses will be unimportant in a month, forgotten completely in a year. I just have to plow on through the now.

So that's my past couple of days. 1,000 times more evil than the couple of days before that.