Life, my friends, is looking up. Oh, I still owe many people e-mail, and I haven't been writing enough, and I'm behind on doing reviews, and I should answer more Flytrap submissions, but these are my typical problems, my baseline problems -- hardly problems at all, really, just things that require some attention and organization and time.

Good things:

Our car is running again, as of this weekend (the battery cables were loose, so I disconnected and reconnected everything, and the battery was stone dead, so I had to let it charge for a good long while, but it seems happy now). My kind co-worker Amelia Beamer was good enough to loan us her car for a couple of days last week so we could get around, too, for which I'm grateful.

I found out today that Rangergirl won the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award in the Best Modern Fantasy category. So, whoo! I won't be able to make the awards ceremony (I'll be on an island in Ohio that day), but it's a nice surprise.

Flytrap layout proceeds apace, as does layout for Jenn Reese's Tales of the Chinese Zodiac (which is going to be beautiful). I've been playing with my nephew, reading a lot, watching good TV (and enjoyably bad TV), cooking fajitas, listening to music, playing games, and generally starting to feel that the world is a nice place again. I always seem to forget, in the midst of the bad times, that most of my life is really quite wonderful. It's nice to be reminded.

There's a very nice review of Rangergirl at SF Crowsnest; thanks to Josh at Bantam for pointing it out to me.

So, you know. Roses coming up everywhere.

Now, if it would just stop raining...