I can't believe I went so long without an update (though I've been twittering and blogging most weeks at The Magic District). Attempting to reconstruct the past, uh, 19 days would be foolhardy, so I'll hit the highlights...

I missed the ninth anniversary of this journal, back on April 20th. (It was a very busy day at work.) But, happy belated ninth, Tropism!

I finally signed the contracts, so it can be told -- Blood Engines and Poison Sleep will be published in Germany! In German, no less! (And if they do well, the others in the series may follow) Get ready for Blut Maschinen and Gift Schlaf (or whatever they end up being called over there). These are my first foreign novel sales. May many more follow.

The Big Book Sale was a huge success -- I made enough money to pay the kid's medical bills for the month and throw some money at the government for quarterly taxes and otherwise keep the wolf from the door; we even get to keep cable TV for at least another month! (Books are still available, too; the only one that's sold out is Poison Sleep, though I'm running low on some of the others.)

I sold "Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters" to fantasy podcast Podcastle. It's a superhero novelette for one of their giant-sized podcasts. Should be cool. Also have an essay, "Accidental Urban Fantasist", in the upcoming May issue of Locus, which has a special section on urban fantasy (partly preoccupied with trying to pin down what exactly "urban fantasy" actually is.) I may use the money from those sales to buy new glasses, because the writer's life, it is glamorous.

We went down to Santa Cruz last Sunday for a big party at our friends Scott & Lynne's, where we got to see their giant adorable baby, whom we hadn't seen since he was mere weeks old. River ran around like a crazy thing and had a fine time, and there was much eating and drinking and chatting. Got to meet one of Scott's old friends who has a poetry MFA and is interested in science fiction poetry, so that was an unexpectedly awesome opportunity for conversation.

I've been reading vast quantities of crime novels, working my way through the Parker novels by Westlake under his "Richard Stark" pseudonym and also reading all his Dortmunder novels I can get my hands on -- only The Bank Shot eludes me, with crazy expensive used copies online and nothing in the Oakland library system. I'm reading them at the rate of about five per week, but there are a lot of them, so I've got tons of good books still ahead of me. Yay!

Not doing much fiction writing. Still waiting to hear back from editors on several different projects. Plinking away a little at a romance novel, but not building up much steam yet. But it's okay. I'm enjoying life.