Jeff VanderMeer, freelance editor and author extraordinaire, has a fancy new website at www.jeffvandermeer.com. Check it out. Makes me want to redesign my own messy messy pages. (Though I did make a google page thingit, which is only links to other content, but hey, it was easy and free.)

I'm listening a lot to the new Modest Mouse album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, and I’m running hot and cold on it. A couple of songs -- "Missed the Boat" and "Fire it Up" -- are in heavy rotation on my novel-writing playlist, but I haven't warmed up to the album overall. Maybe I need to give it a couple more dedicated listens, I dunno. I also finally got Rhett Miller's first solo album, The Instigator -- as a devoted Old 97s fan, I don't know why it took me so long to get the lead singer's solo project, but I was oddly resistant to it, maybe because I like earlier Old 97s stuff better, was lukewarm overall about Satellite Rides, and thought The Instigator would be more like that one. And, yeah, it is, but it has a couple of awesome songs, especially "Our Love". Great stuff. Anybody heard his newer solo album, The Believer? Worth getting?

I finally figured out the broad outlines of the con in my con artist novel Grift Sense. I'm going to be seriously fucking with the conventions of the loveable roguish con artist in this novel (though no more so than Mamet did in House of Games, I guess), and I even know what the very last scene looks like. Which is useful, though I doubt I'll write that scene for, oh, eight or nine months.

It's my day off. (Yay.) I already had to call the DMV, and the guy I talked to was surprisingly nice, if not ultimately very helpful; at least he told me what documents I should send to keep them from suspending my registration. (The DMV thinks I don't have insurance. I sent proof of insurance. They responded that I'd shown them proof of insurance for the wrong car. Which is odd, since I have only the one car, the same car which has been registered for years, covered by the same insurance carrier I've had for years, etc. Anyway, apparently if I send some other documents they'll straighten it out. We shall see.) I'm planning to do a bit of writing on the Death novel today. My goal is to finish the first draft by the end of my day off next week, which should be doable, and shouldn't even be all that exhausting, assuming I can get a few productive hours in today. Which means I should stop writing this and get to work.