Got a couple of awesome blurbs for Rangergirl, so I'm a happy writer today.

Jeffrey Ford says "Tim Pratt's The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl is a two-fisted meta-fiction of old west mythos and modern day -- sharp writing, cool characters, fascinating ideas, and the courage to have fun. Readers of comics and classics and both will enjoy this novel."

Cory Doctorow says "Rangergirl is a fine blend of imaginative and engaging -- a tale well-told."

I'm grateful to both of them for taking the time to read the book and comment. And I love Jeff's phrase, "two-fisted meta-fiction." Now that's a subgenre I want to be associated with!

The August issue of Locus is mailing today, and it includes two reviews of Flytrap 4, which I'll excerpt here. Rich Horton wrote:

[Sonya] Taaffe also contributed ‘‘On the Blindside’’ to the May Flytrap. Sam is a woman about to get married, confronted with a lover who still has a hold on her. The intensely written story slowly reveals the nature of Sam’s lover – a familiar trope – then surprises us with a slight reversal of expected power relationships.

Rich also put "On the Blindside" on his list of recommended stories for the month.

Nick Gevers wrote:

After just four issues, Flytrap is now my firm favorite among the field’s small-press literary zines; and Number Four has an especially strong list of contributors. Theodora Goss’s ‘‘The Belt’’ is her latest revisionist fairytale, and as exquisitely crafted as ever: when a woman of humble origins marries an addled nobleman, she discovers in his fixation an essential truth about qualities of freedom, and, liberating herself, becomes a harbinger of political revolution. The crystalline, timeless prose of Goss finds a powerful echo in Jeffrey Ford’s ‘‘Holt’’, which concerns a stage performer desperately searching, by means of his unique act, for answers to a puzzling – and supernatural – childhood trauma. Jeff VanderMeer ingeniously scrutinizes modes of invisibility in ‘‘The Secret Life of Librarian Bob Scheffel’’; ‘‘Three Creations’’ by Jeremy Adam Smith explores origin myths in the context of a future solar system where humans and machines long for each other’s companionship but are forbidden it; and ‘‘The Lizard of Ooze’’ is Jay Lake’s sardonic satire on the philosophical assumptions of L. Frank Baum, underworld grotesques usurping the places of Dorothy & Co, and all climaxing in a not-so-satisfactory confrontation with a noxious incarnation of Lucius Shepard’s Dragon Griaule. Pungent stuff. A gentler but no less effective examination of the cloying effects of the fantastic: Sonya Taaffe’s ‘‘On the Blindside’’, about a married woman desperate to rub off the taint of her old association with Faerie; Taaffe captures perfectly the eroded charm of childhood fancies re-examined in adulthood. Fortunately, the more mature charm of Flytrap bids fair to last.

So that's all good stuff!

It's my once-fortnightly day off (a Thursday instead of a Wednesday, this time). I've already written a couple of pages of the Bridge novel this morning, and will write many more before the day is out, lord willing and the river don't rise. It's been an okay week, overall. Heather and I had lunch with Nick on Sunday, to say farewell before he lit out for the east coast, but otherwise we've been our usual antisocial selves, drinking rum, playing with the cats, reading books, fighting off the invading ants, and etc. We watched the newest-on-DVD season of Six Feet Under, and man, is that a depressing show. When we were watching the last episode yesterday evening, I turned to Heather and said "What this show is about, is it's about how life is hard." It's actually a good show to watch, tone-wise, while I'm writing the Bridge novel. I like it.

Well, this is enough writing-avoidance behavior for the moment. Back to the ink mines.