Spent much of the day writing an obituary for Octavia Butler. Depressing stuff, but giving her a good send-off is all I can do, so I did my best. Hearing about her death hit me surprisingly hard, considering that I never met her, but her writing made a huge impression on me. She was a writer of undeniable power.

Cheryl Morgan of Emerald City reviewed Rangergirl, and seems to have found it sufficiently strange.

I've been meaning to do a sort of "cool books!" round-up, so here goes:

My Clarion classmate Tobias S. Buckell's novel Crystal Rain is out, and getting good reviews. I haven't had time to read it yet (and at my going rate, it'll be a few months before I do), but I understand it has pirates and badasses and Aztec stuff, so how could you go wrong?

Another book I'm looking forward to, and which is somewhere halfway down my to-read pile, is John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades, sort-of sequel to Old Man's War, which I thought was a lot of fun. He has one of the most engaging prose styles I've ever encountered.

And a book I have read, and found mind-expanding and flesh-creeping, which is now available widely and inexpensively from my own publishers, Bantam Spectra: City of Saints and Madmen by his squidliness Jeff VanderMeer. (Well, by "now available" I mean "available tomorrow," but most of you are probably reading this on Tuesday anyway.)

Writing is going well enough. Over the weekend I did a couple of book reviews, of a de Lint collection and William Browning Spencer's collection. Also got down several more pages of the Bridge novel (I seem to be favoring the slow-and-steady approach over the mad-binge approach).

I've been fighting a head cold, drinking about as much as should be expected, listening to the rain, reading horror stories (Joe R. Lansdale's Lords of the Razor, which I looked at rather cynically until I noticed there was a new Blackburn story by Bradley Denton inside, at which point I perked right up), reading poetry (Braided Creek by Jim Harrison and Ted Kooser, which is damn fine), watching television (Hustle, which makes me want to write about con artists), and closely observing my own late-winter melancholy, because I can use it in the novel, oh, my, yes.