Mine 'n' Michael Bishop's story, "The City Quiet As Death," has been posted at Tor.com, with a gorgeous illustration by Jon Foster.

Also, I'll be at ArmadilloCon 31 in Austin, Texas, August 14-16, if the coconuts last till then.

As I have just finished telling friends Phyllis Conley and Michael Bishop (because Mister Excitement hadn't anything else to tell them), the weather outside is frightful, or at least sloppy -- perfect, anyhow, for settling down for the evening in one's snug, dry, warm, homelike home with novel in hand and eight or nine cats in attendance.  I did chalk up four hours' overtime at the book mines this morning; at one point I found myself working with a copy of Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology and had to make an effort not to get caught up in (re)reading those wonderful poems in the form of epitaphs.  This evening I must keep my attention fixed upon Tom Jones and not yield to the impulse to take Masters' book off the the shelf to look up, oh, just one or two really truly favorite pieces.  It would be like eating potato chips, only more nutritious.

Speaking of epitaphs, I also found a line in Anatole France's Penguin Island that may yet serve for America after eight years of George W. Bush: "there is a point at which infamy becomes fatal to a society."

I awoke this New Year's Day to find the bed lousy with cats (nothing new in that, however), and now, having eaten breakfast for the first time in 2009 (grapefruit, whole wheat toast, hot tea with low-fat milk), I am poised to take my first shower and then plunge into my first novel, Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.  I have this in the two-volume Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction edition and expect to be at it for a while to come.  As Fielding himself wrote:

"My reader then is not to be surprised, if in the course of this work he shall find some chapters very short and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly; for all which I shall not look upon myself as accountable to any court of critical jurisdiction whatever; for as I am in reality the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein; and these laws my readers, whom I consider as my subjects, are bound to believe in and obey ...."

Yes, Master.

I do not propose to rehash 2008, but only to paraphrase Marlene Dietrich in the film Touch of Evil -- it was some kind of a year.  I am going to post a list of the new stories I had published during the past twelve months, just in case somebody is interested in finding and reading them.

All of Creation, Cosmos Magazine [online edition], January 18
The World Within the World, Asimov's Science Fiction, March
The 400-Million-Year Itch, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April
The Woman Under the World, Asimov's Science Fiction, July
Variant, Postscripts [United Kingdom], No. 15, Summer
Slug Hell, Asimov's Science Fiction, September
Sleepless Years, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October-November
Perfect Everything, Asimov's Science Fiction, December

And now I must prepare to greet the new year.  Perhaps I'll even kiss a loose and crazy woman, or a nice sailor.

During the months since my entry dated September 24, I have been coping, just barely, with clinical depression and did not care to inflict myself on fellow Live Journalists.  Those two or three of you who have had to deal with me Up Close And Personal (you know who you are) know how little fun I am when I'm on the downswing.  I've dutifully taken my fluoxetine every morning -- either it is only moderately effective or else I'm so severely depressed that even a doubled daily dose (40 mg) leaves me feeling only moderately depressed -- and poked and plodded through my work day, written nothing, read almost nothing (well, okay: graphic novels and Albert Einstein's Ideas and Opinions), and tried to bear in mind that just as every upswing is inevitably succeeded by a downswing, so, too, is every downswing succeeded by an upswing.  Somewhere in the middle of all this I've had another birthday, my sixtieth, in fact.

Having spent too much of yesterday in a condition of exasperation over telephone and internet connections, I passed this slow Sunday in as nearly inert a state as possible.  Oh, I have gone grocery shopping and baked a strudel (not enough for everybody; sorry) and washed dishes and spoken to my brother Tony's shutterbug girlfriend about a picture of moi for the back cover of a forthcoming story collection, and I did briefly take up the Telecaster to try to strum through George Harrison's "Isn't It a Pity?" (from his 1970 album All Things Must Pass), described by a reviewer as the world's most difficult three-chord song -- one of the chords in question being C#m7b5/G, which looks not so much like something I could actually play on my guitar as the chemical symbol for a godawful carbon über-molecule.

Mostly, though, I've just passed the day stretched out on the bed, with cats all about (my bed is nearly always lousy with cats), sipping tea, reading Asimov's X Stands for Unknown, and occasionally pausing to sigh and wonder when I shall ever make something of myself.

Later: I just now (a little after 7:00 p.m.) finished X Stands for Unknown.  I'd have done so sooner but for taking time out to clean the bathrooms.  Also, Asimov almost lost me in the one chapter on mathematics (the other chapters have to do with subjects I find relatively penetrable, more or less: physics, chemistry, astronomy, and the lunatic fringe that really began to come into its own during the Reagan years, when this book was published).  He confesses, "I lack all trace of mathematical talent.  What I do with numbers is to mathematics what piling one toy block on top of another is to architecture," and then proceeds directly to such matters as that if you "divide 1 by any number, you get another number that is the reciprocal of the first."  Me, I am still pawing at toy blocks, wondering what they're for.  Toward the end of the book, Asimov writes:

"It is precisely because it is fashionable for Americans to know no science, even though they may be well educated otherwise, that they so easily fall prey to nonsense.

"They thus become part of the armies of the night, the purveyors of nitwittery, the retailers of intellectual junk food, the feeders on mental cardboard, for their ignorance keeps them from distinguishing nectar from sewage."

And he winds up:

"... I stand four-square for reason, and object to what seems to me to be irrationality, whatever the source.

"If you are on my side in this, I must warn you that the army of the night has the advantage of overwhelming numbers, and, by its very nature, is immune to reason, so that it is entirely unlikely that you and I can win out.

"We will always remain a tiny and probably hopeless minority, but let us never tire of presenting our view, and of fighting the good fight for the right."

Update: Some hours and a few telephone calls to the BellSouth Helpline later, I am finally reunited with all of you here in cyberspace.  Now let us get on with our virtual lives ....

A bright spot in the morning: while out, I picked up a handful of cheap hardbound books at a sale -- The Larousse Guide to Astronomy, by David Baker; Self-Consciousness, being memoirs by John Updike; X Stands for Unknown, being essays on science by Isaac Asimov; and The Man Who Went Up in Smoke, being the third in a series of ten superior "police procedural" novels by the Swedish husband-and-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.  I read these last in paperback editions during the 1980s and loved 'em.

Another bright spot in the morning: hugs fromsilk_noir.

In the remote event that anybody is really interested, here is my reading list for the second half of the summer:

The Ghost Legion - Kenneth Robeson
Splitting - Fay Weldon
Sapphira and the Slave Girl - Willa Cather
The Arbor House Treasury of Great Science Fiction Short Novels - edited by Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg
Boon, The Mind of the Race, The Wild Asses of the Devil, and The Last Trump (a single work, satirical in purpose, with a long title) - H. G. Wells
Brigands of the Moon - Ray Cummings
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Bel-Ami - Guy de Maupassant
The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life - Homer Eon Flint
The Fixer - Bernard Malamud
In the Beginning: After COBE and Before the Big Bang - John Gribbin
Rivals of Sherlock Holmes - edited by Alan K. Russell

At the moment I am deep into Rivals of Sherlock Holmes Two, also edited by Alan K. Russell, and Ron Redfern's The Making of a Continent (1983), a sort of time-travelogue of North American geology.  And I'm still pecking away at Rootabaga Stories in The Sandburg Treasury, though it's slow going.  Carl Sandburg intended these stories for young readers, and they rely heavily on repetition for effect; the adult reader is apt to find them tiresome in unmeasured doses -- at best, rather twee.  Yet I persevere.