Woo-hoo! I’m off until the New Year! Thank “Bob”! Here’s hoping my iBook arrives soon. This freaky, dead-battery G3 just ain’t cuttin’ the mustard (how would one go about cutting mustard anyway?).

Tomorrow night the boyfriend and I are off to see Brave Combo! I haven’t seen them since 2000, at the Caravan of Dreams, back when it was still alive. I remember my friends and I shared a table with a rather strange couple–the guy wouldn’t dance with his date, so guess who did? Yep, that would be me. Strange night, that was.

Well, my iBook is as dead as disco in 1985. It’s currently in the hands of the good technicians at Apple. Thank “Bob” for Apple Care! The only thing I may have to pay for is the retrieval of all the junk on my harddrive. If the Apple techs can’t save it, they’ll have to send it elsewhere to have the harddrive removed and all my precious files gleaned and saved.

Lesson learned: Uh, learn to back stuff up more often? Seriously, other than a few things on my dinky $5 flash drive, nothing on my iBook was backed up. Shame on me. I’ve learned my lesson, and I’ll be buying a big-ass flash drive this weekend.

I’m currently using one of The Boyfriend’s old computers–a four-year-old G3 iBook that has to stay plugged in all the time because the rechargable battery’s dead. Kind of defeats the purpose of it being a laptop. Ah, well. ‘Tis better than nothing.

The novel is plugging along. My word count ain’t budging much, but that’s because for every 1,000 words I write, I delete 300-400 words of old text that doesn’t fit into the story anymore. But, the plot is coming together, the characters are crawling off the page (which could be dangerous, since some of them are zombies), and I get new ideas every day. Huzzah!

I also started a new story yesterday that just might be the best damn thing I’ve ever written. I don’t know if that’s saying much (it’s probably not), but seriously. It’s gonna be good.

The one caveat to all this progress: my iBook seems to have died this morning. The damn thing just won’t come back on. I press the power button, and it doesn’t make a sound. Lame. I think I see a trip to the Apple Store in my future.

A zombie flash piece I wrote is now out in issue #4 of Cerveauxxx. Don’t know the purchasing info at the moment, just that it’s out. I’ll post more info when I have it.

Speaking of . . . published stuff, one of my very favorite authors, James Lileks, has a new book out this month, Gastroanomalies . . . so buy a copy for all your loved ones this holiday season!