satisfiedCarnival
New Words: 1936
Total Words: 25,545, or approximately one quarter of a book. The 30K wall should be along any minute now
Pages: 119
Reason for stopping: Hit and exceeded my quota. Also, I've finished all the fill-in patchwork on the front end except for half of one scene. And I got the protags out of an endless embassy supper.
Mammalian Assistance: I am spurned! Spurned!
Stimulants: Grape-nuts and Russian Caravan tea
Exercise: Planning a walk when I get home from work tonight, if it's not icky weather again.
Mail: David Prather (probably not that David Prather), reviews Hammered for The Huntsville (Alabama) Times, and is a little too pleased about having caught that copyediting error... for a guy who can't spell "Resnik." Also, he hates the French. (The language, not the country.) But otherwise, he's overwhelmingly complimentary, although his view of the history of the genre doesn't quite jibe with mine:
All this is stirred into a compulsively readable witch's brew, but Bear's greatest talent in "Hammered" is writing about violence in a way that George Pelecanos, Robert Crais and the aforementioned Parker would envy.
Aw, shucks, sir. You'll turn my head.
Synchronistically, Huntsville is about the only place in Alabama I've been. I visited the Space Center when I was a wee bit of a thing. The Saturn rocket made a lasting impression of ooo big.
And Strange Horizons has started their spring fund drive. (You saw it here last.)
Also, racked up another novel rejection yesterday, but forgot to blog it.
Tyop du jour: Vincent titled the glass against his lips
Darling du jour: the elder Pretoria cut Michelangelo off Vincent's arm as neatly as impoverished nobility absconding with an heiress at a debutante's ball.
Books in progress: Ed Sanders, Tales of Beatnik Glory; Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
Interesting research tidbit of the day: The eye of Medusa in the constellation Perseus is the star Algol, called the Ghoul or Demon Star. Algol is an eclipsing binary star, normally about as bright as Polaris (second magnitude), but every two and a half days it dims for roughly eight hours as the dimmer star of the pair passes between the brighter one and Earth.
Other writing-related work: contracts mailed back.