We’re spending a low-key week in Vegas on vacation. The weather has been poor for the last few days but it’s supposed to clear up later in the week so we can go hiking, probably at Red Rock Gorge. Instead, we’re laying low. Amy’s got knitting to keep her busy and I’ve been tooling around on the computers, setting up a wireless network, and playing with whatever toys my dad got. I got a new GPS unit for xmas/birthday and some software, so that’s been fun to poke around.

I finished Jeff Ford’s “The Physiognomy” last night, devouring 3/4 of it on the plane in a single sitting. It’s a great book; anything you can read for hours on end without putting it down definitely fits the bill. I was having a hard time getting into it reading over my lunch break; it’s so dense I found it hard to read in small, 30 minute chunks of reading time. The first half alternated between laugh outloud absurdity (Physiognomist Cley is a first-rate dick and he says what most people think) and unsettling brutality. The second half’s tone is completely different, changing along with the character’s perceptions of the world, and ends on a bittersweet note of uncertainty. I’m not sure if I want to charge into books two and three of the Well-Built City trilogy at this point. So many other things on the reading list.

I brought out Phillip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” and “Pavane” by Keith Roberts, books Andy Duncan had on his recommended reading list. I want to polish off one, if not both of them while I’m out here. I forget how quickly I can plow through books when I’m distracted by other things. Once the xmas/birthday dust settles, I think I’m going to spend some dough on books. I read modern works much, much faster than the ancient stuff and I’m finding that the less popular sagas are less popular for a reason. They’re okay, but don’t hold the same artistic weight as the most famous ones. I’m about 7/8 done with “King Hrolf Kraki Saga” and it’s pretty good but not revelatory. It’s a different style than the Snorri Sturleson type of saga, just like Apollonious of Rhodes’ “Argonautica” just doesn’t live up to the other works of Ancient Greece. Again, it’s not bad, it’s just not eye-opening.

I also hope to get some writing done. Writing felt like way too much work since the beginning of November. I wasn’t enjoying myself when I sat down to write and, as a result, I don’t think much of what I wrote was very good. I think I’ve felt a mounting pressure to write something great post-Clarion when, in reality, you can only write what you’ve got. I think the basic stories of “The Wendigo Killers” and “Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Tears” (the two “big” stories I’ve started post-Clarion) are good but they’ll take a lot of cleaning up because they’re both fairly long and fairly complicated in terms of what I’m trying to achieve. I will clean up some of my other stories and get them out this month. With response times as long as they are, I see no reason to keep pretty good stories on my hard drive when all they probably need is a minor touch-up.