Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Fourth Street was a Fourth Street! Yay Fourth Street! I seem to have gotten only homeopathic quantities of some wonderful people I like, but Fourth Street is so full of wonderful people I like (and not, alas, full of infinite energy sources for me) that it's very hard to avoid this outcome. And it was still a very good Fourth Street full of wonderful people I like.

And now I am home and resting and have sold a novelette, "The Radioactive Etiquette Book," to Analog. So yay go that! It's a madcap interplanetary comedy of diplomacy, complete with aliens and wayyyy too many moving parts, so I'm glad I got all the moving parts sorted out to editorial satisfaction. Hurrah!

I just sold a short story, "The Witch's Second," to Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

This story came about because I was in the middle of writing "The Witch's Second Daughter," and due to line breaks or something I just saw the first three words, and I thought, well, that's another title.

I don't think I'll be trying to write either "The Witch's" or "The Witch's Second Daughter Simpers" or the like, but one never knows. (I chose "simpers" there because it was the verb that seemed least likely to tempt me; my brain has already supplied "recants" as an alternate verb of more interest. Hush, brain.)

ETA: Uh, that appears to make my 80th short story sale.

I totally get sushi.

Today I got steady time, a good long chunk of it.

So I put on my old reliable boots and put my cell phone and my library card in my pocket and my old library books in my old green World Fantasy bag--you know, the Texas one--and I walked to the library to get my new library books.

Let me repeat that: I walked to the library to get my new library books by myself.

It is a gorgeous sunny day here in Minnesota, with just the tiniest smudges of cloud way up high. There was a neighbor kid objecting to her older brother: "That is not how you play football!" and her brother, who was Robin's age, replying, "It is how I play football!" There was a neighbor fixing his mailbox who gave me a neighbor smile, and there was a jogger with whom I exchanged gleeful little girl-jock grins. The field across from the library had been mown yesterday and had iris petals on it. I found the lilacs with my nose before I could find them with my eyes. For the first time I noticed that one of the lakes I walk between on the way back has a twin just beyond the stands of birch and sumac. The grade school (Glacier Hills, have I said how much I love that name?) has fence artwork now, and there's a clump of goldenrod in the crook of a fallen spruce. The little bitty kids who were selling KoolAid were so excited that I was walking and willing to wave at them that they didn't seem the least bit disappointed that I didn't buy their KoolAid. (I hate KoolAid, but I would have bought a cup because I am in the mood to be kind to the world, except they don't let you charge that sort of thing to your library card.)

Naturally by the time I got home, three more of the things I'd requested had come in at the library. Naturally. The steady time will likely go away tonight. I will still need help getting back to the library, or to the doctor or the grocery store or a million other very necessary things. But today I got my own library books. By myself.