Reading: ABOUT TOWN by Ben Yagoda
Music: Velvet Crush "A Single Odessey" and Tom Waits "Used Songs"
Link o' the Day: www.sff.net/people/jdteehan/boskone.html

"The little man in an overcoat that fitted him badly at the shoulders had had a distressing scene with his wife. He had left home with a look of serious determination and had now been going around and around in the central revolving door of a prominent department store's main entrance for fifteen minutes."

This is the opening to a 1927 story by James Thurber called "An American Romance". The story goes on to describe how this man continues to go round and round for two hours more, and attracts all sorts of odd attention.

Now I've not read the story yet. I've only found the reference. The trick is that I don't intend to read the story any time soon. Instead I'm using this idea, this anectdotal image to jumpstart a story. I've already transferred all the day's jotted notes to my files and have even started some of the prose just in order to get the feel for the tone of the story. This should keep my weekend busy.

Tonight I've uploaded updates to my webpage at http://www.sff.net/people/jdteehan and included a new page outlining my freelance typesetting and layout services at http://www.sff.net/people/jdteehan/freelance.html. In addition, there's an added goodie at http://www.sff.net/people/jdteehan/boskone.html which has two pages of pictures from the recent Boskone 40 in Boston. I'm afraid I haven't gotten around to writing up the trip report yet--but it'll be done soon. In the meantime, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. These pages should cover around some 20,000 such words. (among the pix snapped include ones of George RR Martin, David Brin, Hal Clement, William Tenn, Steve Miller & Sharon Lee, and more!

As for tonight's rant... guess what? I've deleted it. I wrote a fevered rant about the recent war and the current administration and upon finishing it I decided--no. I'm not going to waste further space debating the pros and cons of this war and expounding upon the ill feeling I get in my stomach whenever I think of our president. So for my health and sanity, and yours I hope, there will no longer be any discussion in these blogs about anything political for the rest of the year.

2004 is an election year, so we'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

Instead of a rant I'd like to take this moment to thank those who have begun to check out my little blog here (I can see the webcounter rise like the morning tide). I've been enjoying many other people's blogs here and have even gone on to reply to some. I hope to keep doing this, but some nights I'm sure I'm going to totally miss for writing or working or Pretty Maggie. But this past week's experience in blogging has been very positive as it's helped focus and direct some of my random daily thoughts (which seem to never stop) to a forum where I write not only for myself, but for an audience out there somewhere. One person. Three. Three hundred. No pressure.

It's been fun and I'm looking forward to more.

Cheers!

--John Teehan