Month: November 2011

“This is too much madness to fit into one text!”

Let’s see, what did I do today?

I got a haircut. My standard practice of just letting it grow until it gets annoying stands. I could be wrong — I wasn’t wearing my glasses and didn’t do a thorough inspection — but I may have spotted some small amount of gray in the clippings. Hairs of dubious shades show up in my beard all the time, but I can never quite tell if what I’m looking at is some weird anomaly or a precursor of aging to come. Going gray doesn’t bother me — not quite, but almost, the opposite. Going bald, on the other hand, which I think is probably also in the cards for me — if I take an honest look at both family history and my existing hairline — well, I have to admit, the little bit of vanity I have towards my hair gets a little twinge at the thought. But I’m not quite there yet, and the mop I do have was in need of a trim.

So I did that. And I mailed several dozen copies of Kaleidotrope to contributors and subscribers. You really don’t want to know how much that sort of thing costs. Mailing to Canada is relatively cheap; mailing to the UK is remarkably not so. If you’d like to support the zine, and you’d like a copy of the current issue, can I suggest the slightly cheaper (for all of us) e-book copy? It’s a no-frills PDF, but for $2.99 you get almost 100 pages of fantasy and science fiction stories and poems. You can check out the table of contents, along with the cover art and story samples, here. And all the money goes to keeping me from going bankrupt in 2012…when everything I save by not photocopying and not mailing may just get eaten back up by the one cent a word I’m paying contributors.

I also bought some pants. Sometimes, you need pants.

I went for a walk. I watched the latest episode of Fringe. And tonight I watched Attack the Block, a genuinely entertaining monsters-from-outer-space movie.

And that was Saturday, in a nutshell.

This was Friday

I caught the seven o’clock train this morning, and I have to admit it didn’t occur to me until I was almost out the door that it would still be dark at that hour. I’ve been getting another train, about an hour later, recently, so it was a novel experience to be up and about before the sunrise. And then to be coming back home before the sun had set. Those of you with longer commutes, or with earlier starts to your work day, or who are just more often more punctual than I am, won’t think there’s anything so amazing about that. And it’s not like I’ve never been gone to work in the dark. Just not in recent memory.

And, really, that’s the most exciting thing that happened all day, so…

I did finish reading Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide. I liked it, mostly. I think it has a lot of good, and weird, ideas floating around in a feverish mix, but I’m not convinced it ever quite comes together. Still, it won a Nebula when it was published, and it did leave me kind of wanting to read his earlier book Vacuum Flowers, which I understand is very loosely connected.

That was Friday.