Mornin' y'all. We're back in Oakland, as of late-last-night, and slowly downshifting out of island paradise mode. I say "slowly" because our van driver last night was a Hawai'ian, so we spent the whole ride back across the bay talking about the food, the snorkeling, etc. So it was sort of Hawaii-time until we reached our front door. I was awakened this morning by the ram-bam-bang of jackhammers (they're still working on the house foundation), so that wasn't very paradisical. But, I don't go to work until next Monday, so it's still a vacation. There's a pot of kona coffee brewing (we brought back a couple of pounds of coffee beans), so there's that much of the islands left to us, at least.

Along with about a thousand vacation photos. I'll post some here this weekend, probably. At least a couple of the gecko pictures.

The house is messy, and the cats are more-than-usually neurotic, now with additional abandonment issues -- they're following us everywhere, meowing pitifully. Fortunately I can write a journal entry with a cat in my lap, as long as I don't need to write it fast.

But now, alas, I have to pour some coffee and get to work. There's ten days of e-mail to catch up on, and some necessary writing things I have to do soon. I'm not doing NaNoWriMo, but I am going to buckle down and finish revising Blood Engines, so I can get that off my desk (at least, until some editor wants it revised -- assuming some editor wants to buy it). Then I'm going to finish the last two-thirds of the Bridge novel. Speaking of which, there's an interesting article online at the Chronicle about the Golden Gate Bridge and the suicides there -- "A Lethal Beauty". (It's actually part of a series of articles on the subject.) It's mind-boggling that there's not a suicide barrier there (though if one is built, my book necessarily becomes a historical novel). People often reject the notion of a suicide barrier on the Bridge by saying that potential suicides would just kill themselves some other way -- I assumed the same thing, before I started researching this book -- but it's simply not true, as proven by the effectiveness of suicide barriers at other popular suicide locations.

I'd like to see some numbers on suicides from the James "Sunny Jim" Rolph Bridge (better known as the Oakland Bay Bridge). I'm sure they're much lower. It's a less resonant/interesting bridge, I guess (unless you're a William Gibson fan). That oughta take me through the end of the year. I've got two-thirds of a short story written that I started on the honeymoon (I didn't work much, but I woke up early a couple of mornings and put a little notebook time in before Heather woke up and merry frolicking began). I'll try to finish that this week, maybe. I've got an idea for a screenplay (not SF or fantasy at all, oddly enough), so I might try to learn how to write a screenplay after the first of the year. It's going to be a real shift from novels and stories, but it's good to expand one's repertoire, and I'm interested in the form.

I'll write again later, to let y'all know how all that working worked out.