The Final Stage of the Long Goodbye

I put in my notice at the dreaded dayjob today. In eight days time, I shall be free. Free I tell you!

I mean, sure, there’s a new dayjob coming, but I’m fairly sure I wont actually dread this one.

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I’m still spending time away from the computer (and the house) in an effort to force myself to a) write, and b) mark assignments for the not-so-dreaded-and-sadly-almost-done dayjob. My absence from the internets will continue apace for another week, but to keep you amused here’s  a grab-bag of stuff to go look at.

First, Christa Faust’s Hoodtown has just been made available on Kindle. I picked up a copy of this book several years ago and it immediately became one of *those* books. You know, one of the ones you adore with a fierce and hardcore love that makes you skittish about recommending it to anyone, because if they don’t love it you can no longer respect them as reader or a person.

Hoodtown fuses hardboiled detective fiction with lucha-libre wrestling in ways you’re probably not expecting, and it’s easily one of my favourite books ever. You could pretty much read this and Dirk Flinthart’s Brotherly Love and figure out how, I ended up writing Horn .

Also, Charlie Jane Anders’ Six Months, Three Days over on Tor.com is one of the best short stories I’ve read this year. It’s one of those stories that dances along a very narrow thread between awesome and potentially-twee with the confidence and aplomb that makes you forget the thread is even there. Which probably isn’t selling it terribly well, but I’d ask you to trust me – it’s good, it’s free to read, and it’s worth reading.

And Jay Lake says some sensible things about psychotic persistence and writing over at the Shimmer blog. I’ve kinda lost track of the psychotic persistence thing this year, but I’m slowly starting to get it back and this was a useful reminder.

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I am terrible with email at the moment. Actually, I’m kind of terrible with everything at the moment, but it’s manifesting itself spectacularly in the email: I keep discovering there’s messages I thought I’d sent, which it turns out I hadn’t, and occasionally there are emails that I’ve resent when they weren’t actually necessary, ’cause I’d already sent them a few days earlier and forgotten to cross things off the to-do list.

Or I’ll half-write an email and think “yes, that’s done” when really it’s sitting in the partially written email draft folder on my computer.

It’s probably a good thing my dayjob doesn’t involve the use of heavy machinery. Driving a car is probably risky enough, all things considered. My subconscious responds to the chaos of change by creating more chaos, and it has ever been thus.