Today's been a day for puttering. I've almost finished my laundry (just some silks left to hand wash); the apartment is pretty clean; I've paid bills and responded to about half my e-mail. I haven't managed to get started on the one big task I wanted to do today, redoing the CS book proposal -- I'm still planning on doing it tonight, but first I'm going to get out of the house. Take a shower, get dressed, walk down to Barnes and Noble. I need to pick up toner for my printer and a Spanish/English dictionary -- I take a translation exam on Monday to see if my Spanish proficiency is sufficient to pass the grad school language requirement. (Thinking about languages has made me want to study them again. It frustrates me that I don't know French -- especially since Said has felt free to throw in French quotes hither and yon, without translation. And I think it might be good for the project I'm working on if I actually read Tamil -- I can understand it mostly when my parents speak, but that's it. I was fluent once upon a time; surely it's buried in my brain somewhere?) I figure a walk will do me good after being at my desk all day, and the weather is rather lovely this week.
One thing I did do this morning was read through some of the subs to Strange Horizons. It's odd -- if you've been following along, you may have noticed that we haven't been publishing the cheeriest stories. That's not because we particularly like sad/depressing stories. It's just that most of the good ones we've gotten are either sad or depressing or both. Is it so hard to write good, cheerful stories? Triumphant stories? Funny stories? (Okay, I know funny is really hard.) Anyway, it just seems weird. We have a few more upbeat stories scheduled, but it really does seem like most of the good stories we've been reading are downers. I don't want this to turn into "the magazine of depressing speculative fiction". On the plus side, there were some lovely pieces in the batch I read this morning; I hope Jed likes them too. I'm just acting as a first reader/advisor until we get more fiction editors on board to help him out.
Okay, fingers hurt. Talk to you soon.