Our car remains dead, and Heather and I have been people of the bus for the past few days, but otherwise, things are going pretty well. Some highlights:

Last night I wrote about 1,200 words of a new story about a giant magical axe. The story will include no fight scenes at all. It's going to rock.

As y'all may have heard, the company I work for is going to publish Jonathan Strahan's two Year's Best anthologies (variations on the books that were going to be published by ibooks, before it went out of business). Yesterday I did the interior layout for the fantasy volume, and today I'll do the science fiction volume. I'm not doing much in the way of design -- we're using a slightly-modified template provided by a kindly publisher of our acquaintance -- just the grunt work of flowing and formatting the text, etc. But it's the kind of work I love, and get very zenlike about. I've said before that my dream day job would be sitting in a room alone somewhere doing layout all day long, listening to music. I've had a couple of variations on that job, actually, but it's never that pure -- there are always meetings, deadlines, sudden changes, or other things interrupting the clarity of me, alone, getting into the flow of doing layout. But those periods where I'm just working, well, they're some of my happiest moments. It's also part of why I love doing Flytrap, which also has the joy of playing with design.

Heather and I have been indulging a bit in comfort food, since it's been a stressful week (for all kinds of reasons). Cheddar beer potato chips are the frontrunner for this year's Best New Crack. They're awesome.

Had a nice long talk on the phone with D. (my spiritual adviser and minister of war) on Wednesday night, and it really cheered me up. Wish he didn't live 3,000 miles away.

I finished Kiernan's Alabaster, and I just adored it (shocking, I know). Should be easy to review. Now reading Braunbeck's Destinations Unknown, a three-story collection of horror stories about cars, driving, etc. Seems appropriate, and the opening novella is a whole lot of fun. I expect I'll be doing a big horror collection/anthology review for some upcoming issue of A Certain Magazine, because I've read a lot of good stuff lately.

The sun is out this morning. And my first cup of coffee was just perfect.