My to-do list for the day has been ratcheted down to something semi-reasonable, which lands me emotionally somewhere between giddy and distrustful. A summary:

• Leave the house to accomplish some things like getting the mail.
• Do a bunch of research on a couple of things.
• Write some stuff, like the newsletter.
• Remember to eat lunch.
• Probably shower.
• Cook rice to feed husband.

After finishing up such a straight forward day, I have every intention to go out this evening on my own to a public social gathering! My comic shop,  Austin Books, has a lovely Ladies Night every quarter, and it’s always fun.

Last time I made fast friends with one of the employees by jumping in on a game of Gloom and demonstrating soundly just how weird and ridiculous playing Gloom should be. I think that concluded with my tragic clown battling an escaped circus anaconda in a blizzard on top of a mountain. I love that game.

Yesterday was consumed for the most part by a complex ritual to appease the great bureaucracy for another year. Thus is my tax filing complete, that terrible spectre banished from my presence for the time being.

I have a growing pile of books to read, both physically and in my Kindle queue.

George R. R. Martin has lately been plugging his shared universe anthology, Wild Cards. I was in Half Price Books (awesome used book store) last week, trying to find some essay collections, but ended up in science fiction, of course. I remembered I’d read just that morning one of Martin’s blogs on Wild Cards, and decided to see what I could find of the series. I found the first two books in the second trilogy, Aces Abroad and Down and Dirty, so home they came with me. This series has been going on since the 1980’s, and apparently all sorts of authors have early work in these collections.

Sitting on my Kindle, among a backlog of fiction magazine subscriptions like Clarke’s World, is Kameron Hurley’s recent release, The Stars Are Legion. This is the next novel in my queue, and I’m hoping to dive into it next week. I’m looking forward to it.

I’ve been picking my way through a short story collection, American Housewife, by Helen Ellis. It’s hilariously demented, and the one with the cats would fit right in with an eclectic horror anthology. This is currently something I can read in the afternoon when I need to laugh out loud.

I’ve also got some non-fiction that I really need to get to, including The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert MacFarlane. It’s about the very old roads of Britain and other places in the Old World, and sounds amazing and full of information I could turn into stories.

There will always be too many books, and I must attend to the afore-mentioned to-do list. Until tomorrow, friends.