What a gray and dreary day! I spent the morning doing freelance stuff and am now reading my page proofs for Hart & Boot & Other Stories (buy early and often!). Thank heavens for copyeditors. They save writers from looking like fools. (At least, they cut down on the number of times we look like fools.) I think it's a good book.

Saturday we went to see Stranger than Fiction, which I liked quite a bit -- it was sweet and smart and often funny. I don't much like Will Ferrell in his over-the-top comedic mode, but he's fine in these quieter films. My only real complaint with the movie is that Queen Latifah was totally wasted; her character could have been replaced with a cat, since she only existed to give the writer character someone to talk to.

Saturday night we went into the city for a Night Shade party, which was fun -- drinks and food and good conversation, and we left with a big pile of Night Shade titles. Yum. Sunday we went back into the city to do a reading at Borderlands for The Year's Best Fantasy 6, which has stories by both Heather and me. I found out the same publisher is doing the next installment of the series, too, which is great. One of my old college acquaintances (I TA'ed in a poetry class he took) came to the reading; he's living in San Francisco now, getting an MFA in fiction writing. So that was neat. After the reading Heather and I got a fabulous dinner at Limon, a nuevo latino place. Truffled mac & cheese! So good! Then we limped home and collapsed on the couch. It was a good weekend, but exhausting, and next weekend will be similarly busy (we're attending a dinner party on Saturday night, and our writing group is meeting Sunday). On the bright side, the Thanksgiving holiday approaches, giving us a nice loooong weekend to look forward to.

It's good having Monday off. An extra day to recuperate and get work done is nice after that weekend. Alas, I'm not used to having Mondays off, so I didn't realize that there's street sweeping in front of my house on Monday mornings, so I got a %$#&*! parking ticket. Grr. Into every life a little acid rain must fall, I guess.

The John Scalzi-edited issue of Subterranean magazine (the "science fiction cliché" issue) is available free online! It's chockful of good fiction (and it has a nice review of Rangergirl, too.) Check it out.