No, not the evil waiter in D*U*C*K, but the guy who won the auction to have that character named after him. Despite the millions of eBay items you have so kindly bought from me, I cannot presently find your e-mail address, so this is just to let you know that, after an inexcusable delay, the signed ARC of Lost Souls from the person in New York is now on its way to you. Everyone else, please excuse the interruption.

I just realized that lately I spend most of my days playing with dirt and plants, and most of my nights playing with paper, scissors, glue, glitter, jewels, and such. Obviously, I have achieved my near-lifelong ambition of regressing to age 5.

In other news, Peter Straub has selected my story "Pansu" for Fantastic Tales: American Stories of Terror and the Uncanny, which he's editing for the Library of America. The volume is due out in October 2009. (Because I am lazy, I just stole those two sentences from greygirlbeast, who also has a story in the book, and substituted my title.) I'm pleased by Peter's choice of "Pansu," as I'm pretty sure this is the first love the story has received since Camelot Books first released it as a chapbook -- no reviews that I can recall, no reprints except in my own collection -- and I do have a certain affection for it. As I wrote in my foreword to The Devil You Know, after a lot of difficult nonfiction pieces and fiction that was grim in every sense of the word, "Pansu" showed me that I could still thoroughly enjoy writing. Between this anthology and Small Beer's release of Second Line (the Value of X/D*U*C*K omnibus), this October is shaping up to be a big month for me.

Before I got up this morning, I lay in bed thinking about Paul Harvey, which led to thinking about Ray Stevens (there is a connection, though only my old chef at Cookies & Company in Athens is likely to get it), which led to thinking about Drawing Blood, because there was a piece of business in the novel about an employee of the Whirling Disk record store in Missing Mile who'd accidentally ordered something like fifty copies of Ray Stevens' Greatest Hits, and at the time this seemed hilarious to me. I still think it's pretty funny, but -- like many of the little in-jokes and cute references in Drawing Blood -- it is totally irrelevant to the story, and as I lay there, the idea came to me that every novelist starts out trying to create something that looks like the front of a beautiful tapestry and ends up creating something that looks -- at least to himself -- like the back of one. You, the reader, may see the carefully stitched horses and kings and Virgins and floral motifs. Or, if you don't like the book, you may not. Either way, you will never share my view, which is of all the messy, incoherent stitching on the back of the tapestry that is needed to create the design on the front. And the farther away I get, the messier it looks.

Anyway, I've worked that simile quite enough, and I am here to offer you news of a book, not to maunder about books in general. I'm happy to announce that Small Beer Press will be publishing a paperback "omnibus" edition of The Value of X and D*U*C*K, titled Second Line: Two Tales of Love and Cooking in New Orleans. (OK, much of D*U*C*K takes place outside New Orleans, but Two Tales of Love and Cooking in New Orleans and Opelousas would make for an unwieldy subtitle indeed.) "Second line," for anyone who doesn't know, is the New Orleans term for the crowd of revelers that follows a large parade, or for a smaller parade that usually takes place in a poor neighborhood, features brass bands, and often happens after a funeral, in order to celebrate the life of the deceased. There has been no actual death connected with the Liquor novels except the blessed passing of my relationship with Random House, but I think the title fits the book well, since TVoX and D*U*C*K are smaller works attached to the three "big" Liquor novels.

I am very excited about this project because it will make two books I like a lot more affordable and widely available, and also because I admire what Small Beer is doing and am pleased to be working with them. I believe their target publication date is October '09, so I'll have more on this as we get closer to that date. Sorry, I won't be touring or anything like that -- a book tour would be an utter impossibility for me right now -- but I do hope there will be some interesting interviews and other press for Second Line.

This post on therealpzb made me happy, not just for the kind words about D*U*C*K but for the props the poster gives to novellas in general. They're a form I like very much, both to work in and to read. The poster mentions Different Seasons, which may well contain Stephen King's single finest piece of writing ever ("The Body"). I believe Peter Straub does some of his absolute best work in novella form ("Pork Pie Hat," "Mr. Aickman's Air Rifle," more). The post was particularly welcome just now because the latest, otherwise mostly favorable Amazon customer review of Antediluvian Tales complains that "Even D*U*C*K, her latest, has been downgraded to a $35 'novella.'" I suppose it's bad form to bitch about four-star reviews -- and I do appreciate the fact that the reviewer seems to read everything I publish -- but this annoyed me a little. First of all, D*U*C*K wasn't "downgraded" to anything. I contracted with Subterranean Press to write a novella and I wrote one; neither SubPress nor I ever claimed it was going to be anything else. Second, I don't know what those snarky quotation marks are for; novella is a perfectly valid literary term and D*U*C*K is a perfectly valid novella. Third, if you know you don't like novellas and find $35 (a price over which I have no control) too expensive for such a book, don't buy the fucking thing. No one is holding a gun to your head.

Novellas have a bad name even among writers, because they're hard to publish: magazines and anthologies don't want a piece that will take up that amount of space unless you're a big name. And no major publisher is likely to publish a Different Seasons-like collection of novellas unless you're a really big name. One of the things I value deeply about Subterranean Press is that this kind of corporate BS isn't an issue; as long as it's good work, they will publish story collections, novellas, short novels, chapbooks, and other interesting forms for which the larger publishing world has little time.

By the way, I linked to Subterranean's D*U*C*K page because I noticed that Amazon is temporarily out of stock, but in general, it's better to buy my Subterranean books directly from Subterranean; they'll get there so much faster that it's well worth giving up the slight Amazon discount.

Everything had been going so well. Then, last night, we went to Celebration in the Oaks. I remembered that this ended in tears last year, but I thought I was in much better shape now. This year I couldn't even get worked up enough for tears; I just shambled numbly through Storyland and the Botanical Gardens, barely seeing the colorful statues and rides I used to love, not rejoicing that the water-damaged Flying Horses (carousel) were once again operational, not caring about the lights or the spectacle or the happy faces of children, not feeling the magic one damn bit.

"It's like putting jingle bells on a rotting corpse," I said to Chris.

"That's not a fair thing to say," he told me, and he was right. The only rotting corpse in the vicinity of City Park last night was me. I have allowed my imagination and my spirit to rot to the point where I can barely stand to be around the things that used to inspire me (cf. the final scene of D*U*C*K, set at Celebration in the Oaks:

As they walked into the Botanical Gardens, an endless array of tiny lights seemed to stretch before them, multicolored and dazzling, repeated in the long reflecting pool. Stars were never visible in the night sky here, only the purple glow that hung over any brightly lit city, but this must be how they would look if you could see them. Things to count, even though counting them all was impossible. Things to wish on.

In the panoramic shimmer of lights, water, and sky, Rickey thought he could glimpse the future: true love, great food, Bobby Hebert coming to eat at his restaurant, the Saints winning the Super Bowl, the city of New Orleans standing whole, strong, beautiful forever.

This now reads so much like a failed magical spell that I really should have known better than to go to the damned thing. As it was, I ended up where I usually end up, at the statue by the wading pool, which you can find posed with a smiling 12-year-old John Kennedy Toole in the Toole collection at Tulane:

I always appreciate Frank Berkeley's thoughtful Amazon reviews of the Liquor books, but his comments on D*U*C*K seem to be as much a political screed as a review and leave me fairly disturbed. While I agree with the screed, the absolute last thing I want as an author is to be treated like a victim. Books are not charity cases; they must stand on their own merits. I think D*U*C*K does that just fine -- in retrospect, I like it better than Soul Kitchen, perhaps because writing it saved my sanity (what there is of it) in a way that no other story ever has -- but I hope readers of it and my other post-K work will state their honest opinions and not "cut [me] some slack" as a Katrina victim. One major quibble with the review: The first chapter was written first, and I believe it serves the purpose of providing Rickey's motivation for the entire remainder of the story. (One pro reviewer even suggested that the rest of the story is a concussion-induced fantasy brought on by the events of the first chapter. While that wasn't my intention, I found it imaginative and intriguing.) The Ducks Unlimited charity auction happened many months later, as an afterthought, an attempt to give a little something back to DU for the importance they'd assumed in the course of the story. In no way except actually plugging in the winner's name was the chapter written to satisfy the requirements of the auction, and the character needed a new name anyway; I'd originally called him "Brownie," as in "You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie," which was amusing but dumb. I don't know why readers bother to speculate about these things, as they are invariably wrong; they'd do far better to say "The chapter felt extraneous to me" and leave it at that.

As well, I'm utterly mystified by the review's final sentence. D*U*C*K is not an "amuse-bouche," or even an appetizer (O Lord, deliver me from the food metaphors). It is a stand-alone novella. With very rare exceptions (e.g. my downloadable early "novel" The H.O.G. Syndrome, which has been available for free on my website for more than a year now), I don't give my work away. This is what I do for a living. No one in any other profession would be expected to give away five months' worth of hard work, and it always amazes me that people think writers should. And as long as I'm bitching, may I just say that I am sick and tired of complaints about the prices of my Subterranean Press books? I'm poor too, but a review is not an appropriate place to complain about how much a publisher charged you for a book, particularly when even major publishers' hardcovers now cost $35 or close to it. Authors have absolutely no control over the pricing of their books, Subterranean allows me to publish in forms (novellas, short story collections) that don't interest major houses, and I think Subterranean always provides a fine value -- a beautifully crafted, signed book -- for the money. No one is forcing you to buy the stuff. If you want poundage for your buck, go buy a Dean Koontz novel.

Besides, if you bought it on Amazon, it didn't cost you $35. It's currently listed there at $23.10.

Over the past couple of years, I have tried hard to complain less about Amazon and the reader "review" system; it's largely fruitless and, I imagine, tiresome for many readers, and Amazon has improved the system, weeding out/removing more obvious troll reviews and allowing comments on the reviews that are posted (a much-criticized decision, but I think the only fair one). When I do allow myself to do so, with very rare exceptions -- and this isn't one -- my comments on Amazon reviews are not intended to insult the reviewers or discourage them from reviewing future books. However, the declaration, "[W]e cut Poppy some slack [because of Katrina]," from an intelligent reviewer in a four-star review, is more insulting than a plain old bad review could hope to be. To "cut me slack" due to the events of the last eighteen months is patronizing and assumes knowledge of me that you do not possess unless you know me personally and well: "Oh, well, look what happened to her; it's a wonder she can write anything at all." The reason I'm not currently writing anything is because I no longer feel capable of doing good work until I've established a permanent home base and gotten my shit together (in several senses of the expression). I was recently rereading Paul Theroux's Hotel Honolulu -- an irritating novel in many respects, but near the end I came across this quote (he's discussing the progession of his writing life from youth to middle age):

All this time I had been writing. Then my life was fractured. I fled and found myself with fragments of my life, and so swiftly had time passed that I had outstripped my ability to write any of it.

I think that is exactly where I am now. Theroux often has the ability to point out what should have been obvious to me in a succinct and clear-eyed way, particularly when it has to do with writing. I was able to write D*U*C*K, and I hope do a good job with it, because it was a fantasy, a kind of fairy tale. The next Liquor book won't be, and midway through, it became clear to me that I wasn't ready to write it yet. Until I am, I may well take on a nonfiction, non-K-related project I've been contemplating for a couple of years but wasn't sure when I would find time for with Rickey and G-man tugging at my sleeve all the time. I miss them badly, but to rush the telling of their story would do a disservice to them, myself, and my readers, and the nonfiction project would be nearly as close to my heart.

I'm not happy with all of my work in retrospect, and I don't know how D*U*C*K (or my other recent work) will hold up for me in ten years, but I will never deliberately palm off substandard work on my readers for the sake of a buck. If I didn't think D*U*C*K was good work, I wouldn't have published it, and I don't expect to be cut any goddamn slack for it. If you don't like the book or any future book of mine, I am sorry, but hold me responsible -- not the one-eyed bitch, the failure of the federal levees, or everfucking Bush. (That goes double if you do like it, natch!)

I'm told that D*U*C*K is now shipping from Subterranean Press, along with copies of the Liquor for Christmas chapbook if you ordered in time.

I've been rereading Alan Moore's graphic masterpiece From Hell. I didn't much like Eddie Campbell's artwork when I first read this back in 1999, but now I can't imagine why; it's perfect for the story. Last night I fell asleep while reading Moore's extensive end-notes and dreamed unceasingly of Jack the Ripper. Chris said that when he came home, I opened my eyes and gave him a terrified stare.

I don't believe in reincarnation per se (though who knows what life-force is or where it comes from), but if I did, the East End of Victorian London is one of the three places I'd expect to have lived. As long as I can remember I've had a compelling image in my mind of a single cobblestoned streetcorner somewhere near Tower Bridge (though I didn't know where it was for a long time and don't think Tower Bridge would have been built yet), lit by a single gaslamp late at night, dreadful yet somehow alluring. The other lives I'd expect to find I'd had are in a temple in South India and in one of those villages with the round thatch-roofed huts in sub-Saharan Africa, landscapes that have always felt intensely familiar to me despite my never having laid eyes on them.

It has been politely called to my attention that my "dead-end job" comment was unnecessarily snotty given the fact that I was decrying the snottiness of people who use terms like "Chalmettairie." Mea culpa. I plead Lower Magazine Street Cool People Overload. Here's hoping my Internet stays on at home so I can cease to darken the door of that skeezy joint. Hey, what the hell do I know? -- maybe Mr. Chalmettairie is putting himself through medical school or writing a novel that will sell more copies than anything I've ever written. (If I had to guess, though, I'd bet he is in a band. And that they suck.)

An excerpt from Waiting For Bobby Hebert will be posted on the Subterranean Press website sometime in the next few days. It's not the beginning, which is still somewhat rough, but a couple of sections from around page 50. (Instead of chapters, I've been dividing this story into Roman-numeraled sections with Frasier-esque titles, something I've never done before and am not certain why I'm doing now. "It just feels right," as the artistes say.)

I am not dead. However, my Internet connection at home appears to be. Cox has been "working on it" since Wednesday. As they've also been "working on" getting us an expanded channel package for more than a month now, but have only managed to increase our plan from basic to digital basic, I am not optimistic. They were incompetent before the storm, but their incompetence has now taken on a life of its own, bought a house in the suburbs, and started raising a family. Unfortunately, since the whole TV/Internet package belongs to our landlord, not us, there's no way I can turn to a different company.

It's getting very old, though. I don't miss the idiocy of the Internet, and I'm reading more than usual, but I miss my LJ friends and need my eBay income. I know I should have come to the coffeeshop sooner -- it's only a ten-minute walk, and people have started calling to make sure I didn't take all the -pams -- but Christ on a little pink sidecar, how I hate this place. I just heard one of the uber-cool counter people insult several thousand people (not to their faces, of course) by using the term "Chalmettairie." Yes, all suburbs are exactly the same, as are the people who live there, and you're soooooooo much cooler because you have a dead-end job making lattes on Magazine Street.

Besides, making fun of Chalmette at this point really should cause a bolt to descend from heaven and strike you dead.

Fucking cool people. God, how I hate 'em.

Not much other news. The roofers put a nail through the freon line of our air conditioning on Friday night, so we are hot as well as Internet-less. Though temperatures have been in the high 80s/low 90s, this isn't as uncomfortable as you might think; the house was built to stay cool, with thick walls and high ceilings. With the windows open and the fans going, it's not at all bad. The cats think it's great; they've never hesitated to let me know that I keep the apartment too cold. I work on Waiting For Bobby Hebert, which is going to overshoot its deadline by a couple of weeks and is probably going to end up with a different title. I read thrillers from the drugstore paperback racks, for which I have developed an insatiable appetite (seven in the past six days). I get this craving every year when the weather turns hot, and fortunately there is always a new crop to satisfy it. Mostly I can't remember which killer went with which story, but the convoluted machinations feed something in me, and every once in a while a really fine writer turns up (Michael Connelly, Jonathan Kellerman). And Pete made Marisol food at Bacchanal last night -- I had stuffed pork belly with blackberry habanero sauce, duck confit with mee krob noodles, and a BBQ lamb kim chee bowl -- so that was a brief but welcome diversion.

I suppose that's all for now. Assuming an Internet miracle fails to happen, I'll try not to let another week pass before checking back in here, but did I mention that I really hate this coffeeshop?

Well, it looks as if the Internet is working again, at least for now. Actually, I suspect that the Internet got along nicely in my absence. While in some ways it was good for me to have several days away from it, I was appalled at the feeling that a big chunk of my brain had been cut off. I hadn't realized how completely accustomed I've become to having most of the information in the world at my fingertips -- being able to look up Allen Iverson's 2005 stats or how to say "Turn the damn music down!" in Spanish within seconds of needing to know these things.

I think I'll wait a few days to see if it stays on before putting up new eBay auctions or anything of that nature.

Waiting For Bobby Hebert continues to go well. The other night I wrote a couple of funny scenes that I thought might be a bit heavy-handed, but Chris pronounced them "brilliant," something he's never said to me before. He is seldom strongly critical of my work, but isn't generally profligate with his praise, either (though he's a sucker for detailed kitchen scenes in which at least one thing goes horribly wrong). Of course, being the Philistine that I am, I couldn't help but think of those Terry Gilliam-esque guys from the Guinness commercial spouting "Brilliant! Brilliant!" At any rate, the novella is at about 17,500 words now, and my contract calls for at least 30,000, so I've got my work cut out for me the rest of this month.

My God, my God. I am either on phantom crack I don't know about or I've had an undiagnosed stroke. I just forgot about a character, Marquis, the young cook at Liquor. Just completely forgot him. He's there in Prime and Soul Kitchen, and as far as I am aware he didn't get fired, quit, or die, but he is completely absent from The Novella Whose Name Only Bobby Hebert Can Tell. At least I'm in good company -- Raymond Chandler did the same thing once, and didn't realize it until someone asked him about the guy long after the book was published. ("I just forgot all about him," the unembarrassed Chandler reportedly said.) Since I'm only a little more than halfway through the novella, I can fix it.

While Googling to make sure it really was Raymond Chandler, I found this "interview" with Michael Connelly, one of my favorite modern writers. I thought I was reading a very pedestrian interview to which he was somehow coming up with intelligent and patient answers until I got toward the end, at which point the interviewer suddenly seemed to become a mad aspiring writer: "I've got a great story idea, how do I get it to you? Will you read my unpublished novel? Can you help me find an agent?" It was at that point that I, PZB, Boy Genius, finally figured out that I was reading a FAQ Bookbrowse had taken from Connelly's website. OK, I'm a dumbass, but even with permission, I think it's pretty lame to publish a FAQ as an interview.

There's a crazy mockingbird in the neighborhood who starts singing around one A.M. and often goes on until dawn. I have no idea if I've ever seen him, but he has become a dear friend to me. His voice is the last thing I hear before I fall asleep, unless Chris, Nathan, Myron, or all three are snoring.

I dearly want the Miraculous Seahorse of Bacon, but since I know the cats would only destroy it, I bring it to your attention instead.

One thing that hasn't changed in New Orleans: Everything fun happens at once. The Our Lady of Good Counsel fish fry. A crawfish boil by the world's best crawfish boiler. Two open Saints practices. A couple of good festivals. Of course my goddamn back just has to be killing me*, but I shall rise from my bed of pain and go do some of these things anyway.

I seem to get a lot of advice lately. Some of it is appreciated, some of it isn't. Telling me New Orleans isn't healthy for me and I should go elsewhere definitely is not appreciated, and drugs are always more appreciated than advice of any kind. (Actually, I've cut back on the -pams quite a bit -- I still like to have them around for really bad moments, but numbing myself more than fifty percent of the time didn't seem to be terribly useful, since I was basically hysterical whenever I wasn't on the pills. Painkillers are always good, though.) Even the folks who urge me to "just take a short vacation," though I know they mean well, are missing a major point: I have a May 1 novella deadline I'd really like to meet, and I've never worked particularly well on the road.

Actually, I probably should take a couple of days off and go to Opelousas, since a large section toward the end of Waiting For Bobby Hebert is set there. Unfortunately, the way things stand right now, my back is in no shape to drive (or ride) three hours unless all I plan to do upon arrival is get stinking drunk ... and the best booze cure for back pain seems to be dirty martinis ... and while there are some wonderful restaurants in Opelousas, I bet there isn't a single one that makes good dirty martinis. You see the difficulties.

I'm starting to get a great many interview questions along the lines of "How has Hurricane Katrina affected your life?" It's understandable, but has become basically unanswerable. I think I'm just going to take up saying, "I started drinking my coffee black, my husband started eating hamburgers again for the first time since he was 17, and I started watching The West Wing even though it really gets on my nerves most of the time. That's it. No big deal."


*This is my weak-sounding but honest excuse for not yet having thanked several people for cat donations and copies of "Here Comes the Flood" they've kindly sent. I can sit in bed and write on the iBook, but the wireless in our apartment isn't currently working, and sitting at my desk (where I have to be to get online) is too painful to do for long even though I have a pretty good chair. So, naturally, I'm even further behind on my e-mail than usual. Apologies to all.

I don't know if it was my wonderful attorney, the beef tongue in my freezer, the apostles in my shoes, or a combination of the three, but my case was dismissed and there will be no ticket on my record. After court, my attorney and I went and ate delicious oily muffulettas at Nor-Joe's.

Can you tell how much I like the Hunter S. Thompson-ish ring of "my attorney and I"? As a matter of fact, my attorney's initials are HST. How cool is that?

Although I had to get up early for court, I was awake until 4:30 last night working on Waiting For Bobby Hebert. It's at 12,000-something words now, nearly half done. I should mention that the title may have to be changed if I don't hear from Mr. H soon regarding the use of his name. Technically, he is a public figure and it would probably be fine, but I have no desire to do so against his wishes, and using it without permission makes Bill of Subterranean Press "antsy" (you don't hear enough of that word lately, and it's a damn good one). Unfortunately, I am not Stephen King and cannot just call Bobby and invite him to lunch the way King did with Tom Gordon. Well, I can, but no one returns my calls.

Guess where I just came from: the newly reopened Uptown Wal-Mart (you know, the one you probably saw on CNN where New Orleans cops and other citizens were "finding" big-screen TVs and other useful hurricane supplies). Guess what I bought there: A BEEF TONGUE. Ah ha ha ha ha ha. I shall prevail in traffic court tomorrow. It's absolutely no reflection on my excellent lawyer, you understand, but I just feel better going to court if I've got a beef tongue in the freezer. You can't entirely take the hoodoo out of the man, I guess.

My library research was a bit of a letdown: apparently Bobby wasn't quite as dominant in that game as I'd been led to believe. I'm stuck with it, though, as I established in Soul Kitchen that that was the first Saints game Rickey ever attended, when he was 13. (It's a flashback.) I may have to fudge a little after all.

Tonight Chris and I plan to make meatloaf sandwiches with sauteed peppers and onions (thank you, Dagwood) and watch LSU beat the snot out of Dook.

I've been responding to anybody who said anything about my South Park/Scientology post by saying, "I can't help it -- I hate all my ex-boyfriends, even the imaginary ones." But then I realized it wasn't true. I still love Hawkeye Pierce, and always will. When I was 8 or 9, I had a rich alternate life as an army doctor at the 4077th. My gender was indeterminate, but Hawkeye and I were definitely, deeply in love and planned to get married when we returned to the States. (You'll recall the episode when Hawkeye was nice to the gay soldier Frank wanted to get court-martialed.)

Just came from my old house, where I had to pick up a few things. My friend K calls it my "real house" out of kindness, but it doesn't feel like my real house anymore. It feels sad and dead, and another piece of my heart dies every time I go there. Today I briefly explored the backyard, which is a wilderness of fallen pine and other branches. The sixty-year-old bird of paradise plant is definitely dead. I'd heard they could come back from almost anything, but apparently not a week with their roots soaking in oil and sewage.

Today I must go to the main branch of the New Orleans Public Library, where they keep back issues of the Times-Picayune on microfilm, and read about a Saints/Green Bay Packers game that took place on September 14, 1986. I know Bobby Hebert threw two huge passes in the game, but I don't know when they occurred or anything else about the sequence. Don't let this put you off buying the book, sports haters. I promise this is only a minuscule part of the story, and if I were a lazy writer I'd just fudge it, but I'm not and I can't.

I had a burst of energy last night: after putting up my eBay auctions, I wrote several pages, then spent a couple of hours creating a doll that makes me feel sad, creepy, and cleansed, all at once somehow. She's on eBay now, as I don't think I could bear to live with her over the long term.

Have I mentioned how much I enjoy writing a long story that requires virtually no research? I don't think I've done that since Liquor, which required some inquiry into licensing procedures in New Orleans (most of which was far too stultifyingly dull to put in the book, but I still had to know it) but was otherwise an utterly research-free book, unless you count particularly detailed how-was-work-honey conversations with your husband as "research." Last night I had to do a little reading about a certain Saints game in 1986, and I may have to go back to Opelousas at some point (o woe! boudin! cracklins! lunches at the legendary Palace Cafe!), but other than that, Waiting For Bobby Hebert has been virtually researchless. It's hard to explain the sensation of freedom that gives me: I don't have to read this book on casinos or these Googled articles on money laundering; I don't have to learn the inner workings of the DA's office; I can read anything I want to. Don't get me wrong; I enjoy doing research and learning things I'd never have known if not for some detail of something I was writing. Once in a while, though, it's nice to just lie back and let the story rub your feet.

Just got in from the Avenue, where I saw the second half of Thoth and the first half of Mid-City. I felt absurdly irresponsible when I heard Okeanos rolling at 11:00 this morning and wasn't out there to see them -- since we're living so close to the parade route this year, I feel as if it's my duty to see every single parade -- but my friend Bobby from Athens is in town, and he's coming Uptown this evening to watch Bacchus and Endymion with me and then eat at Chris' restaurant, and I've just got to conserve a little energy. Had I remembered sooner that Thoth was an ibis, though, I'd have been out there for the whole parade.

I was partly good last night. I stayed in and wrote, but what I wrote turned out to be by far the most explicit sex scene I've ever written about Rickey and G-man. I feel ambiguous about this for a couple of reasons. First, readers have been encouraging me -- sometimes not very politely -- to resume writing "erotica," and I don't like seeming as if I'm doing anything to order, so to speak. Second, Rickey and G-man have traditionally been very reticent about having their sex life splashed all over the page for my own titillation or that of readers -- there's a fairly raw scene in "Bayou de la Mère," some in The Value of X,, and, aside from a couple of soft-focus fadeouts in the Liquor novels, that's about it. However, last night's scene (in Waiting For Bobby Hebert) seemed as if it needed to be there, and I don't have a sense of the guys tapping their fingers and scowling at me, so I suppose it will be all right. My standards of "explicitness," though, have changed over the years. The days of eighteen-page sex scenes are long gone.

There has been a pair of Carolina Chickadees at our feeders off and on all day. Hardly an unusual bird for the area, but I've never had any personal visits from them before.

Please God, don't let these long johns have had this huge hole right over the buttcrack when I wore them to the grocery a few weeks ago. I knew I should have listened to Chris when he told me they were obviously underwear and weren't fit for the public.

I am jonesing mightily for daube glacé. The hell of it is that I only knew about it for a month or so before the storm, and now you can't get it. I mean, obviously I've known about daube glacé for much longer than that, but I didn't know they made it at Langenstein's or how addictively delicious their version was. My friend Kenneth got me hooked on it when I took him to a doctor's appointment one day and we stopped by Langenstein's afterward. That was in July, and I think I had already eaten six or eight packages by late August. Now the Langenstein's people say the lady who makes it isn't coming back until at least March, maybe longer. I've looked at a couple of recipes, but I think they are beyond my culinary capabilities, and Chris, the selfish, puling underwear-declarer, refuses to even attempt it. Tonight I wrote a horrible kitchen accident involving daube glacé into Waiting For Bobby Hebert. I didn't even realize I was going to do it; I was just frustrated.

I'm a little perturbed, though not entirely surprised, by the fact that (judging from the first 30-odd pages) this novella seems to be at least in part a story about how Rickey rubs people the wrong way. Because it appears to take place in a slightly different universe from the rest of the Liquor stories, I'm not at all sure whether he has undergone the same process of honing and growth he did in Soul Kitchen. Time will tell, I suppose.

Today's mail brought my contributor's copies of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, which reprints "The Devil of Delery Street." For my money, Stephen Jones' anthologies are the only best-horror books currently worth reading, though I do wish he'd stop doing the year-end roundups if they're going to be so incredibly slapdash. I'm in a position to know that "Caitlín R. Kiernan's novel Murder of Angels was a haunted house novel set in Birmingham, Alabama, in which schizophrenic musician Niki Ky heard her dead lover calling to her from another world" and "Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust's Triads was a fix-up novel that involved two Asian boys and a vengeful ghost" are characterizations of these books so inaccurate as to verge on the bizarre, and that "The Feast of St. Rosalie" is neither horror nor a novella; it makes me wonder how many weird-ass mistakes are in here that I don't know about. Also, the mere fact that there exists a book called Swamp Witch Piquante and Scream Queen Bisque (Over A Bed of Rice) makes me want to rip my eyeballs out of my head, burn them, grind the ashes into submolecular particles, and shoot the whole mess off to that new planet beyond Pluto. No big deal, though, as most readers probably just skim these roundup deals or ignore them entirely, and the stories themselves are almost always good.

Because my character Shake Vojtaskovic features prominently in "Waiting for Bobby Hebert," I decided I needed to reread "The Working Slob's Prayer," in which he also comes to the forefront. I grabbed Outsiders off the shelf, started flipping through it, and thought, "You know, it's really shameful how authors so seldom read the anthologies they appear in. I'm going to read this next." I read most of it last night, and guess what: editors Nancy Holder and Nancy Kilpatrick were right. Despite the packaging and despite what some reviewers have said, it's really not a horror anthology. It contains some horror stories, some dark fantasy, some noir-ish stuff (thomasroche's "Violent Angel" is a standout in this category, and a very funny one too), and one story about sweaty chefs that doesn't seem nearly as out of place as I feared it would. Most of the stories are very good; hell, even Tanith Lee's goofy-gothety vampire thing was sort of entertaining. Oddly enough, "The Working Slob's Prayer" may have more in common with Jack Ketchum's "Lighten Up" than with any other story in the book. Both are about regular, hard-drinking folks refusing to let the daytime world's standards of morality and normalcy be imposed upon them (and it occurs to me that this is one of the few characterizations applicable to both my recent work and my early stuff). I didn't care at all for Ketchum's much-vaunted novel The Girl Next Door and don't recall reading anything else by him, but I liked "Lighten Up" very much despite the title's being one of the three or four most annoying phrases in the English language.

I won't go through and comment on other stories since I know almost all the contributors and don't want anyone to feel slighted, but I'm three stories from the end and haven't hit a real dog yet, and I don't expect Brian Hodge, Elizabeth Engstrom, or Joe Lansdale to deliver one.

A female House Finch has been hanging around my feeders since I hung them in November. This week she was joined by a beautiful male. We also have two pairs of Cardinals (or maybe one female with two males vying for her attention -- I can tell the males apart, but haven't seen both females at the same time), an American Goldfinch (though I've not seen her for a week or so now; she may have gone north), and a piteousness of pinheaded Mourning Doves. This morning, just as I was waking up, I saw a juvenile Blue Jay. I hope he doesn't scare everyone else off, though I wouldn't mind if he got rid of the gluttonous squirrels.

Speaking of birds, I've been reading a fascinating book, Mary Mycio's Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, about the radiation zone around the Ukrainian nuclear plant. I thought it would still be a wasteland, but apparently it's doing rather well: while a few people still live there, most of it has gone back to woods and wetlands, and wildlife is thriving: moose, elk, thousands of birds. The formerly almost-extinct Black Stork has been so successful in this area that it is no longer endangered. The animals are radioactive, but they are not mutants and, even when they leave the so-called "alienation zone," they're not capable of harming anyone unless eaten. It's not a gung-ho, yay-nukes book, but it does present the 1986 event as a painful paradox rather than an unmitigated disaster.

"Waiting for Bobby Hebert" is now available for preorder on Subterranean Press' website. Given that I've written just over 4000 words of this novella, it's far too early in the game to know whether the finished version will hew faithfully to the current description, but it's better than the blurb Subterranean had up before, which made it sound like I was pregnant (a reference to my "due date").