I’m back in the land of the conscious.

I was very tired last night, unusually so, and I turned in early, thinking perhaps I was just short on sleep. Woke up this morning to find my sinuses seemingly packed with cotton, with wicked post-nasal drip making my throat sore. Not to mention Sahara-level dehydration and aches in both body-and-head. So I stayed in bed while Heather called in sick for me. I got up long enough to drink lots of tea (hoping to fix that dehydration thing), eat some citrus fruit, and to relocate to the living room, where I collapsed on the couch with my iPod loaded up with shows from Theory of Everything, my new favorite audio-crack. Our cat Zanzibar promptly climbed onto my chest and went to sleep. I got about fifteen minutes into one of the ToE shows before falling asleep myself. And there I slept until about 2:30. I'm feeling better now -- still tired, but my sinuses seem to have cavities again, and I don't ache like I did -- so I think jamming the equivalent of two night's worth of sleep into a single day did the restorative trick. Let's hope so, anyway. I have to go to work tomorrow regardless, because the issue goes to press in a week, and there's still tons of writing and layout to do.

In the good news department, the first thing I saw when I woke up and checked e-mail was a message from Shawna McCarthy at Realms of Fantasy accepting the collab I did with Greg van Eekhout, "Robots and Falling Hearts." Whoo! Tim Pratt returns to Realms, and Greg Van Eekhout debuts there! It's a hell of a story, too.

That's about it for news. I'm going to go drink more tea and read now.