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.

New eBay auctions are finally live: letter II (eye eye) of the deluxe Used Stories hardcover; the anthologies Dick For A Day and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (for the year 2004), and a Plastic Jesus ARC, all signed and ready for personalization.

Because it contains a Super Bowl story, I reread Hunter S. Thompson's mini-collection Screwjack last night. When I reviewed this great little book for the Times-Picayune in 2000, I remember how hard the following lines hit me: "Half drunk full of pills and grass with deadlines past and people howling in New York … the pressure piles up like a hang-fire lightning ball in the brain. Tired and wiggy from no sleep or at least not enough. Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again." This was a few months before I started writing Liquor, it had been ages since I'd finished anything I was happy with or that gave me any pleasure to write, and these words may have gone a long way toward giving me the kick in the ass I desperately needed at that time. Thanks, HST.

I don't know if it is the same for other writers, but when I'm in the thick of writing a novel, I have to be very careful about what I put in my head. I can't just read for pleasure and entertainment and general information as I do at other times. It becomes more like a recipe: if you are making turtle soup, say, you need to put in turtle meat and onions and sherry, but if you suddenly dump in a bunch of Hershey's syrup, you'll fuck it up beyond repair. Most recently I was reading for atmosphere (A DEATH IN TEXAS) and information (HUEY LONG INVADES NEW ORLEANS), but I suddenly felt the need to fill my head with a clear, uncluttered narrative voice, so I picked up THE ROALD DAHL OMNIBUS and ended up reading the whole damn thing -- stories I'd read dozens of times before as well as completely new material. I think my two favorite pieces are the much-anthologized but worthy "Taste" and "Man from the South."

Unfortunately, since fall is one of the big publishing seasons, summer ends up being one of the big blurb-hunting seasons. Pleas for me to say a few nice words about a manuscript, as well as the manuscripts themselves, arrive from hither and yon. If I don't know the author's work, I usually send regrets, but many of them are from writers I admire and would like to help, so I try to fit them into the mix. (And once in a while I get a request that's head-spinning in its cluelessness. Usually it's a vampire novel, but earlier this year a U.K. editor who'd written one of the rudest and most unprofessional rejection letters I've ever received sent me a proof copy of a novel he was editing with a request for a blurb. I confess I threw both galley and letter in the litterbox, a highly immature act -- after all, it's not the author's fault his editor is an ass -- that nonetheless gave me great satisfaction.)

Contrary to some reports, I am a fairly nice person, and I have given too many blurbs in the past out of a misguided wish to help people I liked even if they weren't among the world's great writers. (I tend to agree with Hunter Thompson's contention that no blurb ever sold more than five copies of a book, but even if they don't attract readers, they can catch the attention of marketing departments and store buyers, very helpful people for an author to have in his corner.) I'm trying to cut back on the amount of material I blurb (isn't that an ugly word? almost as bad as blog), but currently on my desk are manuscripts by two writers whose work I genuinely like, Christopher Golden and Greg Herren. I'm going to try to get to them. Ultimately, though, one's own book has to be God, and it will make the decision for me.