The Loneliest Number

I'm not going to indulge in self-pity now that Matt has gone to California as of this morning. Women send their husbands to war zones every day; less dramatically, there are lots of long-distance relationships out there, many of them lasting for years. But I am having a very hard time concentrating on my work right now.

There's this (thanks to Tiffany):

I don't think music actually gets much better than this. It's the best new thing I've heard in eons, knocking me over the head with itself. Some elements are thieved rather shamelessly from "Cecilia", but aside from that (or if you can get over it, which I can), this song reinforces all the stuff about which I rant without cease about how much value pop has for us as a culture.

Listening to the rest of the album, they also steal from Queen (duh) and Elton John, among others. Watch me try to care. The melting pot of influences and larceny is how we get stuff like David Bowie and Beck, after all.

I'm not sure if I'll put in much of a workday, after all. My brain's not working that efficiently.

I submitted a couple of stories this morning, and I've got my book sitting next to me. The proofs came yesterday. I've more or less read it again, and found a bunch of errors I need to fix for the next round, and there's really no reason for me to pick up the paperback and read it yet once more. But it's so appealing, sitting there.

In book form, by me.  

I just want to pick it up and flip through it over and over. But there's no reason to. Can you imagine how I'll be when I'm actually published, when I've got a book in real bookstore format? I'll strap it to my chest like a sack of flour and carry it around with me. Yeulgh.

Here's the blurb I wrote about it, below. Comments welcome. I still need to do the elevator pitch, etc.

But not today.

All Available Time: a novel about relationships and regret through the lens of malleable time. Pushing thirty and disconnected from much of her life, Elaine Robinson travels with her five best friends to a remote lodge in central Virginia for a week of quiet and camaraderie. But the lodge has an unexpected resident: an old and heartless Timelooker, a being with the power to manipulate time and bend it to her whims. As they struggle to outwit this creature, Lainey and her friends must also confront matters of time and loss that they haven't laid to rest. Long-dead family members refuse to be consigned to memory, and long-buried emotions erupt in the present. A journey into the murkiness of the human heart, as well as across two centuries, All Available Time is a supernatural thriller that is nevertheless deeply felt and redemptive.