John Scalzi's latest Book Haul entry mentions Dead Reign, and it's extra amusing because it's a video blog entry and because my book fights one of his books, which is being published on the same day. Rawr, bookfight!

Speaking of ol' DR, the first review is online, written by the diligent Mentatjack. (He's also giving away copies of the first two books in the series.) Dead Reign will be out in like three months, which seems both very far away and very soon...

Other highlights and lowlights of the past week, as they occur to me:

• Buffalo burgers are tasty.

• My bank account was diminished to double digits, but fortunately I got a paycheck and a freelance check deposited before anything could actually bounce. (I made a lot of money writing last month, but I used it all to pay down debts and buy yummy food. Sigh.)

• River is completely over his adventures in anesthesia, and reverted to a normal sleeping-through-the-night night last night. (That's a lot of nights in that sentence. Sorry about that. And that's a lot of that's in those sentences. I'll just stop.)

• Our new clean balcony is awesome.

• I got really nice fan mail from someone in charge of a US government organization.

• I'm completely and totally not writing any fiction. I should write more stories but I want to write novels and I'm between novels but I guess I could write a novel on spec but I don't know which one. Too many ideas, none sufficiently ripe. I'm waiting for a story collab to get bounced back to me -- maybe that'll spur me into action.

• For various reasons I took River to work two full days this week and he was great both days -- today he slept like five hours, a long nap in the morning and a longer nap in the afternoon. I got a ton of work done.

• I'm reading various things with my shattered attention span and watching bad movies Tivo'ed off HBO. (Two stars? Good enough for me! Though my theory is that two-star movies are the worst -- they're usually just boring. One-star movies are often so hideously bad that they're entertaining.)

• Listening to Neko Case and Beck.

• Watching DVDs of, yes, The O.C., which is a better show than it has any right to be. Melodramatic and silly and occasionally ridiculous, but sometimes the writing is really sharp, and I love some of the characters a lot. I also like The Middleman, though I don't love it. I might love Wendy's character, but the titular guy doesn't do much for me, and some of the little quirky things that were cute in the first couple of episodes are beginning to grate with repetition. Oh, and, yeah, Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, I love that, just like almost all of you do. I'd watch Felicia Day in almost anything. The Guild, which she writes, is awesome too, perhaps more so if you're a MMORPG player....

Like Eddie Vedder says at the end of "Dirty Frank" -- I think that's enough.