Good things:

So far this week, I've actually accomplished things! It's amazing! I finally finished writing the introduction to Sonya Taaffe's forthcoming collection Singing Innocence and Experience, in which I unleashed the full force of my admiration for her writing. I'm pretty happy with it, and so are Sonya and the publisher.

The Rangergirl spin-off story is running at about 5,000 words now, and the end is in sight. I just have to write a bit about the black art of bodily bilocation, kill a misbegotten creature of infinite evil, kill an immortal hero, and ride off into the sunrise...

My super-cool editor Juliet gave me a plush holiday Cthulhu for Xmas! He goes nicely with our Gothic Cthulhu. It's been a monstrous good year for gifts.

We finally sent out our holiday chapbooks today! Whoo! Late, as always, but at least it wasn't mid-January before we sent them out this time...

We lost our mailing list when my computer crashed and had to reconstruct it from memory, so if you usually get a chapbook, and don't this year, don't assume we've decided to snub you -- just let me know if one doesn't show up in a week or so! We think we got almost everybody, though.

I've been reading Scattered, Smothered, Covered. It's good stuff, and is a beautiful object to boot.

How to Be Creative is a good book (and all available to read online, for the moment), with lots of useful advice. I still spend a lot of time thinking about advertising and marketing (funny how a mere six months as a copywriter has stuck with me), so I found his perspective particularly interesting, but even putting that aside, there's lots of great advice for people who want to be serious about being creative.

For new year's, I splurged on a bottle of the widow. Should make ringing in the new year extra-pleasant.

Today is my once-fortnightly day off. That's a good thing. Friday is a half-day. Also a good thing. I don't go to work at all next Monday. Extra-good. My old friend Brian is headed west on a cross-country road trip, and will be visiting me next week, barring the unforeseen, which is double-extra-good.

It's my friend Dawson's birthday today. Happy birthday, D.!

I have, in the past two days, experienced two brief periods of utter, unexplainable euphoria, complete full-body waves of peace and bliss that enveloped me for long seconds and left me feeling refreshed (it felt better than being on ecstasy ever did, honestly). I know it's just random brain-chemistry stuff, burps of serotonin or floods of endorphins, but when I feel like that, I can understand why people believe in god. I get those waves every once in a while, sometimes randomly, sometimes in apparent response to emotional or physical stimuli (and no, I don't mean orgasms, which is a different feeling), but this is the first time I've gotten two in two consecutive days.

Hope it doesn't mean I have a brain tumor or something.