Back home safe and sound–well, safe and sick is probably more accurate. First day back at work and it seems like I’ve been here forever but it’s only been two hours. Six more to go. Ugh.

Got very little reading and no writing done while on vacation, which is fine. Now that the holidays are behind us and Amy’s back in school I will be able to get down to business. I want to get out a handful of stories by the end of the month–probably “From the Mouths of Babes” with a rework, “Twenty Pound Hammers” with little reworked, and probably “Change of Seasons” as it is. Still waiting to hear back from Cicada on the last one; they’ve had it for a near eternity and perhaps I have a rejection letter in last week’s mail.

I was tossing and turning last night, due in large part to my sore throat and the fact that my sleep schedule is out of whack. I used a good deal of the time to think about the structure and plot elements of a partially written story, “Sea of Traquility, Sea of Tears” and I think I’ve got a better handle on what needs to happen. I need to put aside time to crank this one out and “The Wendigo Killers” as well. Too much laborious thinking and hand-wringing and not enough writing with these two; the problems will not fully be clear (and the solutions as well) until they’re finished. Mulling these things over is [b]not[/b] a good way to lull yourself to sleep, however. But I know this.

As mentioned earlier, I finished Jeff Ford’s “The Physiognomy” over my break and devoured about 1/4 of Phillip Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” on the trip back yesterday. I found it hard to get into at first but once I figured out who people are and what’s going on it was impossible to put down–dedicated reading time is the best part of air travel. I almost made it a full 50 pages before I had to find a pen, go back to the start and begin underlining passages. One of the reviews on the book’s cover calls it “a novel of ideas” and that’s about right. I usually don’t underline when I’m reading for pure entertainment value but this book is different; lots of interesting and often competing philosophies floating around. Underlining helps me pin them down in my brain.

My reading time was cut into severely by watching a couple movies on the laptop, namely “Kill Bill” and “School of Rock.” I was pleasantly surprised by the latter. I was never a Jack Black fan until I heard Tenacious D and loved it; for PG-13 humor, “School of Rock” was really quite good. The foul language is part of what makes Tenacious D so funny and I feared that without that crutch the movie would be lame, like one that’s been edited for network broadcast and left bereft of humor. But JB is still good, even if his schtick will probably wear thin sooner than later.

I have a lot more to say about “Kill Bill Vol. I” primarily because I wanted to like it more than I did. I liked it, but…yeah, more on that later. Not enough time to fully go into it now.