Yesterday felt very strange, the first day I didn't do anything on End of the Century in a long, long time. I spent yesterday catching up on correspondance and such, read a bit, and then today reviewed the copy-edited manuscript of the expanded Set the Seas on Fire, reviewed the page proofs on a cool thing I don't think I can mention yet, and got back up to speed on Iron Jaw and Hummingbird, which is mostly written and completely outlined, and which I'll be finishing the next few weeks. Figured out a few more cool things about The Pursuit of the Lily Stargazer in the car, stuck in traffic after picking Georgia up from school (finding a way to slot two more half-ideas from other notions into the plot, and discovering that they fit nicely).

I've been switching gears from one project to the next, which usually involves reading quite a bit in a short amount of time. So yesterday I finally had a chance to sit down and read all of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls, which was every bit as strange and transgressive as I'd anticipated. Then, inadvertently grinding my mental gears, I read Diana Wynne Jones's new novella from Firebird, The Game (I thought for sure I'd read some of Jones's stuff years ago, but looking over her list of published works, nothing is ringing a bell, which means I might have confused someone else's novel as hers), which I thought was a charming little story, sort of a mash-up of Zelazny's Amber stories with Robert Holdstock's Mythago stuff, with something of the flavor of Madeleine L'Engle. Having recognized another gap in my education, this afternoon at Half Price Books I picked up the first of Jones's Chrestomanci books, Charmed Life, and started reading it during my walk, and I'm digging it so far.

Okay, I'm off to make Georgia's dinner. Dinosaur nuggets tonight, I think.