Whoa. Totally didn't meant to sleep until noon. I mean, I was up until 3 a.m. last night, so it's not that lazy, but still. The past two days I've been awakened by the jackhammer alarm clock of people working on the house foundation, so this morning, when no such noise arose at 8 a.m., I just sailed right along in sleep.

Last night the neighbors had a rockin' loud party that required blasting, at wall-vibrating volume, some of the more dubious hits of the '80s and '90s. They quieted down promptly at midnight, though, so it wasn't so bad.

Yesterday was sort of an odd day. I revised the first 40,000 words of Blood Engines, so I'm nearly halfway through. That required a lot of butt-in-chair time. I told myself I only had to do the first hundred pages, but I actually got into the work, and went 40 pages beyond that. This is more than line-editing, too -- I'm laying in foreshadowing, fixing some broken timeline issues, and repairing some continuity errors, in addition to massaging the prose. I'd hoped to finish the other half of the revisions today, and then give the book a full read-through on Sunday to deal with any lingering clunky-prose issues. That was before I woke up at noon, though. Don't know if I'll have time to finish now. I'll give it a try. The back half of the book doesn't need as much in the way of new/deleted scenes, so it's possible.

Also yesterday: I read Heather several stories from the Asimov/Conklin anthology 50 Short Science Fiction Tales (1963). I got that book when I was a kid and read and reread it literally to pieces -- for years, my copy had pages falling out, and was missing the last third or so entirely. A few years ago I found it had been reprinted, and picked up a copy. The stories are SF and fantasy, all short, mostly very simple, sometimes sweet, sometimes disturbing, and I read Heather a few of my favorites -- "Who's Cribbing" by Jack Lewis, "Narapoia" by Alan Nelson, "Counter Charm" by Peter Philips, "See?" by Edward G. Robles, Jr. I also read her "The Hunters" by Walt Sheldon, prefaced with this explanation: "Here's a story that relies on a horrible science fiction cliché, the kind that would make an editor want to punch you in the face if you submitted it today, but it's okay, because this story very likely originated the cliché." Then she read me a couple of others, Alan Bloch's "Men are Different" and, possibly my favorite story in the whole book, "Oscar" by Cleve Cartmill. I love that book with the fierce love of justified nostalgia.

We also watched a couple of episodes, on DVD, of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (lots of fun), and some eps from season 2 of Home Movies. I discovered, with outrageous joy, that they've finally released American Gothic on DVD. Y'all know the show? The Southern supernatural TV series featuring that kid from Sling Blade, along with Gary Cole, starrring as evil hissownself? I loved it when it was on TV, and I never saw all the episodes. It's next in the the Netflix queue.

What else did we do... played a little GTA: San Andreas, which I had previously put aside in favor of playing the hell out of World of Warcraft in order to get my main character to the max level, 60. (And about three weeks after I hit that level, Blizzard announced a game expansion which will raise the level cap to 70. C'est la vie. So much for the pinnacle of my computerized achievement.) Heather wrote a bunch of thank-you notes (and I need to write several today). I read some more of Storm of Swords, which I'm still enjoying immensely.

Oh, and Heather and I had a big good long deep talk about Where We Go From Here, what with us being a married couple and everything now, with all the huge wedding-and-honeymoon-planning stuff behind us now. It was more an "opening of an ongoing discussion" than a planning meeting, but it was good anyway.

So, ah, pretty full day yesterday. Dunno if today will compare. I'm making the most of the dregs of my vacation, though.

Oh, and here's my favorite picture of geckos from Hawaii. They're eating jam, y'all.

(Click to see it a little bigger.)