Reading: The Eight Stage of Fandom
Music: Billy Bragg's "Talking With the Taxman About Poetry"
Link o' the Day: Pulp.net

I've been purging.

No, it's not what you think. I enjoy good food too much to let it go to waste like that. No, I've been purging my apartment instead. It's a slow process, and at first glance it may take a while to notice anything, but believe me--_I_ know.

Today I went through my filing cabinets, desk, and some of my shelves throwing out the mass of stuff I've acquired through eighteen years of packus rattusitis. It's amazing some of the stuff I've found. Old postcards, index cards with notes written down for stories I never got around to because back then I was drinking more than anything else. Old notebooks. Old magazines. More copies of pictures that I'll ever need. My desk had receipts, business cards, and old letters dating back to 1989.

Anyway, I'm making room for Pretty Maggie who moves up in June. And most of this juunk I'm finding I've not seen in literally decades. I see no reason to keep all of it. It's going to be a long process, but a healthy one I'm sure. I keep telling myself this.

I've been throwing out all my old IBM diskettes with programs unusable on anything I currently keep operating in this house. Note, I'll be saving my TRS Model IV and Apple II disks--I'll be saving those two systems. The Clix, the TRS-80, Tandy TL/2 100, TI, misc 8086s, the IBM AIX box, and a a variety of obscene peripherals are all going to the trash if I can't yardsale them. Some are too big to consider eBaying.

I've put a few things aside for eBay which I will likely start doing in June. When I attended the MilPhil Worldcon I funded the majority of it by selling old books on eBay. I'll likely do the same for Torcon--only slightly less so.

* * *
Not a whole lot of writing has been done since Thursday. I did some editing this morning, and last night was busy with a scheduled event. I have changes in for both the voice acting book and the Hollywood book. I'll likely get started on them tonight.

The Boston Review sent back my poems with a thanks, but no thanks. Ingrates. They wouldn't know a good poem if it bit them on the ---well... anyway, they've already been mailed off to new markets. Markets with better taste.

* * *
Today's featured music is Billy Bragg's "Talking With the Taxman About Poetry." Now this is a guy who can write! Bob Dylan wishes he could write with half as much skill. I've been a Billy Bragg fan since I first heard "The Milkman of Human Kindness". When I was going to school at the University of Exeter oh-so-many years ago, I played a lot of guitar on the streets to help pay the living expenses. Most of my songs were Mr. Bragg's. And to bring this back into writing, my story, "Digger Don't Take No Requests" which appears in the soon-to-be-available Low Ports from Meisha Merlin was inspired by my days of busking on the streets of Exeter.

* * *
Today's Link goes to Pulp.net, a page with links to just about everything and everywhere you'd ever want to know or read about them great old pulp magazines. There's a lot of great stuff here--too much to list. If you have an interest in some of the roots of SF/Fantasy, this is the place to go.

All right, time for me to get back to work. Got some writing to do!

Cheers!