Among the many many many words that my word processor's spellcheck doesn't recognize: manticore, psychopomp, fumarole, and Valkyries. I bet I could build a good story around those keywords alone...

I was thinking about that great Margaret Atwood poem "Spelling" today. It had a big effect on me when I was a young writer. I should write more poetry.

Changes have been made to Rangergirl. I spent most of the afternoon last Saturday typing them in, and finished up on Sunday morning. I read over it one last time on Monday night to root out continuity errors and typos and the like. (I'm sure I missed some. By then, it was hard to see anything other than individual words as lonely, discrete units; my ability to perceive the novel as more than a collection of individual parts dissolved sometime Sunday.) Then I sent it off. It's a book! We'll see what my editor thinks.

But the weekend wasn't all Ranger-wrangling! Saturday night we went out and saw Constantine, which I enjoyed quite a bit, having fully prepared myself for it to have little or no relation to the comic. And, lo, so it was! Oddly, of the two-thirds full theater, Heather and I were the only people to stay through the credits to see the last little extra scene at the end. Don't those people read the internet?!

We had a nice dinner on Saturday, too. I had a steak topped with gorgonzola. Damn, life can be decadent sometimes.

Sunday we went for a hike in the afternoon, on the Huckleberry trail. Shady, lovely, and lightly traveled. We passed a couple of other trails on the way that were thronged with people out to enjoy the nice weather, but driving a couple of miles farther meant we had pretty much the whole trail to ourselves, and we even found parking in the tiny 12-car gravel lot at the trailhead. Beautiful stuff. We ambled along, Heather took pictures, we talked about our respective novels-in-progress, and we just generally had a lovely time, though we were both sore on Monday. It's not a hard trail at all, but we're woefully out of shape. We're working on that, though.

Sunday night I headed over-and-down to the Pacifica bowling alley to meet with my writing group. (We didn't bowl; there was a totally unpopulated dining area in a separate section, with a view of the beach, so we workshopped there.) It's always nice seeing them, and I got to show them my book cover. Whee! Getting more exercise lately has, oddly, made me more sociable. Usually the thought of group social activity sort of exhausts me, but walking a couple of miles every day has really upped my energy level, and I don't find the prospect of being with other people as daunting.

Otherwise, we're still watching Wonderfalls. I'm reading Magic Street by Orson Scott Card for review. Tonight I'm planning to wash dishes and type my mini-epic. Work is work -- not very stressful right at the moment, but there are a bunch of shifting variables that could mean stress in the near future. Still, I'll worry about that when and if it materializes.

In the meantime, I'll be enjoying the springtime light, thinking about the Bridge novel, and just generally bopping along.