With the fire behind us and a torch in my hand

1. I think this afternoon at Café Pamplona may be the first time I've ever eaten at a restaurant with its own Wikipedia page. It was extremely tasty, though; I had their signature sandwich with the pickles and very nice conversation with the philosopher who does not have a livejournal. Then I got rained on a lot.

2. Fortunately, when I got home, the mail had brought my contributor's copies of Not One of Us #45, containing my story "A Wolf in Iceland Is the Child of a Lie" and my poem "Incubation." The latter was written for teenybuffalo; it's the zombie oracle poem that is not as awesome as Lucan's Pharsalia, though really nothing is. The former is the first non-flash fiction I've completed since the summer of 2008 and I'm actually proud of it, when I'm not still terrified I got it wrong. I grew up on D'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants (1967); their Loki was the first god I fell in love with, that long-eyed slantwise smile, the shapes he takes in the fire and his hair made of embers and flame. (It was inevitable, when I read Howl's Moving Castle, that I associate him with Calcifer.) I knew who everyone was in Eight Days of Luke as soon as they appeared, ditto American Gods, and it took me until this past December to write directly about any of these figures, even though the central one has been in my head on and off since college. I think it came out all right. I couldn't quite work in the Móðuharðindin, but I want to know now if anyone has ever written Sigyn/Angrboða, and if not, why not. The story was written mostly to Sigur Rós and some entirely unrelated things, like Bellowhead and Mission of Burma.

You should also check out the rest of the issue, of course, because I think it's an especially strong one: featuring such un/seen things as Patricia Russo's "The Sweepers," Erik Amundsen's "Mote," Kelly Rose Pflug-Back's "Birch," Francesca Forrest's "Down the Drain," Jason Maurer's "I Bet Pliny the Elder Didn't Cite His Sources," and that's just the half of it. asakiyume's story is illustrated with one of her own photographs. I found a book on how to be invisible . . .

3. Kathe Koja's Under the Poppy (2010) cannot qualify as the best book I've read in weeks, because I've actually had quite good book luck so far this year—Wittgenstein, Iain Banks, Got fun nekome, The Hare with Amber Eyes—but there is sex with puppets on page two and it goes from there, like the novel hiding in the strings of Angela Carter's "The Loves of Lady Purple"; it seems to be even less safe to read on public transportation than Roman Homosexuality, but I am enjoying it immensely so far. It is also set during a time period about which I know nothing—Brussels in the 1870's—and therefore I cannot, for once, tell which way the history is going to jump.

4. I could still do with not having this cold.