It's a wonderful obsession, like a passionate affair

My poem "кот древнее и неприкосновенное животное" has been accepted by Not One of Us. The title means "the cat is an ancient and inviolable creature"; it is spoken by the black demon-cat Behemoth right before he does something chaotic in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I wrote it for our black cats with their clever paws, their sincere eyes, and their research-defying tastes in human food.

My contributor's copy of Shimmer 2017: The Collected Stories just arrived on our doorstep. It is a handsome trade paperback of the year's fiction edited by E. Catherine Tobler, including my story "The Creeping Influences." Authors include Mary Robinette Kowal, Aimee Ogden, Michael Matheson, Charles Payseur, Martin Cahill, Natalia Theodoridou, Maria Haskins, Octavia Cade, and Naru Dames Sundar. I am looking forward to reading and re-reading everything.

In a year in which I feel like I did almost nothing worth naming, these are especially nice developments at the end of December.

I slept less than an hour last night. That's part of the reason I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon. I remember a sense of apocalypse in my dreams and something about the age of sail, but the only setting I can call to mind is a garden store.