Morning

Getting up at 9 a.m. is definitely preferable to getting up at noon. I can use that extra three hours for, um, dithering around and reading stuff online. Hmm. Still, at least I won't spend the day feeling as if I wasted my morning with sleep.

The good news keeps rollin' in. "Robots and Falling Hearts", the story I co-wrote with Greg van Eekhout and which subsequently appeared in Realms of Fantasy, will be reprinted in Year's Best Fantasy 6, edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. This will be my third consecutive appearance in their anthology, and I thank them again for supporting my work. I was saddened when I heard that Eos was no longer going publish the fantasy volume (they are continuing the longer-running SF volume), and was heard to remark "Well, I guess there's not much chance of me getting into a year's best next year." But then local heroes Tachyon Publications picked up the series (and will be publishing it in fancy trade paperback, no less), so all is right with the world again. Greg and I plan to split the money and buy lots of beer. Maybe also some wings.

Looks like a gray Saturday out there, and it's been cold for the past couple of days. Still, I'm sure I'll find wondrous things to enjoy in life, even if they're only fictional words on a page.

(I'm feeling optimistic today.)

Nick Mamatas and Eliani Torres co-wrote a story, which was recently published at John Scalzi's blog, Whatever. Go read "Who Put the Bomp?". In the comments I said it was like the fiction of Howard Waldrop meets the memoir of Whitley Strieber (I was mostly trying to be funny, but there's a grain of truth in there).

I did do some work this morning. Typed and revised my story "Morris and the Machine" and sent it off to my writing group. It's an honest-to-gosh science fiction story, which I'd planned long ago to send to the science fiction clichés issue of Subterranean (I missed that deadline by a few months, naturally). It uses a very familiar SF trope in, I hope, an interesting way.

We went out to brunch at Blackberry Bistro, as part of Heather's Palindrome Birthday Weekend! Yummy food, of course, and the company doesn't get any better.

Afternoon

We got a birthday pastry for Heather from the Montclair Bakery (their cakes are delicious but way too much for two people who are trying to be less gluttonous these days).

We frolicked the afternoon away.

Evening

Just returned (at 10 p.m.) from a lovely night in San Francisco. We took the train in around 6, and ambled around Union Square to Cortez, a tapas restaurant with crazy-yummy food. (I'm not normally a fan of tapas, but this was exceptional.) Heather loves tapas, and it was her birthday restaurant of choice. I think my favorite was probably the prawns with crab rice. Mmm. After a long, luxurious meal, we went for a walk, through Union Square (with its giant monument to the Spanish-American war, without a word on the inscription about warmongering and yellow journalism, natch). We went into Cody's books, which was almost utterly deserted, and browsed for a while. They had half a dozen copies of Rangergirl, faced-out on the shelves, so all is well. Then we headed home again, feeling fine and peaceful. An all-out wonderful day. Tomorrow we'll go see a movie and do a hot tub, also in celebration of Heather's Palindrome Birthday. Things, my friends are good.