The Beast is Off

To the races? Nay, Stalking the Beast is lumbering back to editor James Sutter at Paizo. Whew. I’m starting to feel pleased, although I’m also a bit dazed after the final push. Today, apart from a laborious spell check (a lot of words from Pathfinder aren’t recognized by the spell checker) I was mostly tweaking some really subtle things that will probably never get noticed. Getting them fixed made me feel better, at least.

I finally managed to win a crayon rail game, the first in probably the last ten I played against my brilliant wife, and the second time I played Martian Rails. Also, I pulled the one Leigh Brackett title card in the game near the last hand, as if the gods of Mars and random chance were operating in my favor. Nice. Father’s Day was pleasant, and included a slightly moist walk in some woods near our old house and a tasty lunch with fried oysters. Well, with the family, actually, but I ate fried oysters.

I’ve been slowly working my way through the second Cugel the Clever novel in the Dying Earth omnibus, and I’m enjoying it even more than the first. It’s an odd thing, but as I age, my tastes are sort of broadening at the same time I get more particular. I have even less patience for sloppy storytelling and plotholes than I did before (and I never had much), but I find that I have more patience for different kinds of writing than I used to enjoy. Vance stories can frequently be more picaresque than I typically like, but I’m fully on board with this. And in March I read and loved Tanith Lee’s Night’s Master, from her famed Flat Earth cycle. I’ve often found her prose beautiful but distant, with scenes rather than plots, but this book I loved.