My Summer Vacation

Oh, the power of the Florida tourism board. The postcard above is what it's supposed to look like around these parts. Oranges and architecture. Everglades and Flipper.


But this is what we've had over the last few months...


We had a deficit of just under four inches of rain heading into July. We left with a surplus of three inches. We had fourteen days in a row of rain. It's been good writing weather, to be sure.

And now it's looking like Hanna, Ike and Josephine are lining up to take their shots at us over the next ten days.

But, despite the fact that we discovered there's a river in the back yard when the heavens drop four inches on our house, the summer was still quite a good one.

I caught some fish:

Explored some ancient cities:Caught up with some great people:

The Cooleys, Portland, Oregon

Saw some sunrises:

And spent lots of hours on the kayaks with my beautiful wife, Jeanne.

I wrote a pair of longish (5,500 and 6,800 words) short stories and I'm more than half of the way through with a major revision of a novel that I've been working on with Bernadette over the last month. The work comes in sips and swallows, but I make sure to get a drink each day.

I'm pretty excited with where it's all going.

I've read novels by Palahniuk (Lullaby), O'Connell (The Resurrectionist), White (Black Widow), Konrath (Bloody Mary), Pronzini (Fever) and Jeff Sommers (The Digital Plague). I read collections edited by Datlow and Pelan and I looked at all of the stories in Skeleton Crew for about the fortieth time. I'm currently loving Duel, by Richard Matheson.

I cooked Cuban, Mexican, Italian, Floribbean and Southern.

I took some long runs with friends from the college and cooked on the grill at least three nights each week.

I caught almost all of the summer blockbusters, and I saw some of the films that skirted the margins of popular culture as well (do yourself a favor and go see Transiberian--review forthcoming on Friday).

It's been a productive and relaxing summer, all in all. I hope yours was filled with long days and pleasant nights as well.

And I have to admit that I missed checking in here on a daily basis for at least a little bit of writing about--well, among other things--the act and process of writing. That said, I'm heading back to the format that I set for last year:

• Let's talk publishing and writing on Mondays and Wednesdays;
• On Tuesdays I'll identify and comment on another market in speculative fiction;
• Thursdays are reserved for book discussions and we'll talk movies on Fridays.

Of course, I'll drop in here and there to chat news, sports and popular culture as well.

I'd love to hear from you folks on your summers as well. Pop in and let me know how the time passed...