(I wrote this yesterday but forgot to post it...)

Yawn. Woke up around 7 a.m. to talk on the phone to one of the [redacted]-rights people at my literary agency. Some neat stuff is bubbling and percolating, which I'll report when and if it becomes real.

In other news, our cat Marzipan is limping and mewling and generally being unhappy. We don't know what she did to herself -- she hasn't been outside, but maybe she managed to fall off a bookshelf and land badly? Anyway, I'm taking her to the vet later today. Hope it's something minor. She's pretty miserable.

Update: Our cat managed to dislocate her knee somehow. Vet popped it in and gave her an anti-inflammatory shot, and we're supposed to keep an eye on her. Either way she goes back in on Friday and gets anesthetized, because her teeth are in desperate need of cleaning (she doesn't really let us brush them). If she's still having knee trouble, the vet will do some x-rays and see what's what.

Faren Miller says nice things about Blood Engines in the current issue of Locus:

For all its elements of sex and violence, Pratt's Blood Engines is more of a romp, first in a series featuring the bad-tempered sorceress Marla Mason and her blithe, not-really-human sidekick, Rondeau. While Rondeau looks on their trip to San Francisco as an entertaining getaway, for Marla, it's a necessary nuisance as she tries to hook up with an old acquaintance and get her hands on an occult artifact that should help her survive the machinations of a rival sorceress back in Felport, the city she regards as entirely her own turf – and her personal responsibility, as its magical guardian.

Naturally, things don't go as planned. Some kind of megalomaniac outsider starts taking down members of San Francisco's more communal group of sorcerers in a gruesome manner, and if they all die she may never find the object known as the Cornerstone. So what had seemed like a relatively straightforward quest turns into more of a detective story, with the fate of at least two cities at stake. Along the way, the duo will meet various sorcerers with specialties appropriate to their home ground – from a sexaholic who throws exclusive orgies/S&M sessions in his mansion to a supreme computer maven whose lair is a ''nonexistent'' BART station – as well as seeing plenty of local landmarks.

But their most interesting new acquaintance is a shabby guy who at first seems like nothing but a washed-up Hollywood actor who's become a member of the local homeless community. These days, he just calls himself B... and the true cause of his downfall is... the inadvertent acquisition of true vision and a sense for the uncanny. Without B, Blood Engines might remain an entertaining Odd Couple tale of a rough woman and her polished sidekick, but whenever he's around the story takes on more depth. I hope he'll be back in the sequel, Poison Sleep.

Nice to see Bradley Bowman get some love, since the other reviews have tended to focus on Marla and Rondeau. B doesn't reappear in Poison Sleep, but he's got an important role in Dead Reign and a major part in Grift Sense.

Somebody liked The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl. It's comforting to know people are still reading it! (I know it's only, like, two years old, but it seems like forever ago that I wrote and published it...)