Heather went out to a birthday dinner with her sister last night, and then to farewell karaoke for a departing co-worker, so I was here, home, alone, alone, alas, alack. I kept busy, though. I installed more RAM into my four-year-old desktop computer (it's got a gig of RAM now, double what it had before, and it's performing much better). I played some World of Warcraft. I got sufficiently bored that I did my freelance work last night, which means I have nothing I must do this morning. (I'm going to try to write some fiction today. Wish me luck.)

I watched Heist last night, one of David Mamet's crime flicks, which has been on the Tivo forever. I have a weakness for Mamet movies, and this one was pretty good. I'm also reading Joe R. Lansdale's forthcoming collection, The Shadows Kith and Kin, and am into his classic novella "The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance", which is like the distilled essence of everything that's awesome about his crime/suspense stories. As a result of these two influences I want to write a crime story with lots of cursing and weird dialogue...

This is nice -- reader Adron Buske read Little Gods and talked about it on his blog. My favorite bit:

There's plenty of material to dig into, here, but my two favorite stories from the collection are "Bleeding West", a gritty piece of mythology in the spaghetti western tradition, and "Behemoth", a tale of forsaken friendships, unrequited love and the creatures of the apocalypse that left me weeping in a corner at Starbucks.

Those are two of my favorite stories, too -- "Bleeding West" is in many ways the spiritual predecessor to Rangergirl, and I've always thought "Behemoth" was one of the saddest things I've ever written, though it's not a story readers mention much, so I figured it only really worked for me. Nice to see someone else found it affecting.

Meanwhile Mark Loggins recounts a dream he believes was inspired by Rangergirl. That's right. You can't even hide from me in your dreams.