Today is Argentina's birthday (equivalent to the 4th of July in the US), where we celebrate throwing off the Spanish yoke.  It's also a bright, sunny day, even if it is freezing outside.  So no day-job work.

We have a lunch in a little while, which will be impossible to get out of, but the later afternoon should be free to be enjoyed.

In other news, last night I finished the translation I was working on and sent it off, and I also sent of a few contest entries (some contests accept reprints, which is always cool, while others demand original work - there's a nice list of no-fee contests over at Ralan).

I also finished reading War of the Worlds: Global Dispatches, a 1996 antho edited by Kevin J. Anderson which collects short fiction from a bunch of big names telling the War of the Worlds from the point of view of different period eyewitnesses, so, for example, you have a story in which Jules Verne is the main character, another with Joseph Conrad, Einstein, etc..  This was one of the weaker anthos I've seen recently from a big publisher, but the reason for this might be that the writers were extremely constrained in what they could do:  the aliens, their origin, physiognomy, actions, weapons, timeline and death, were all pre-ordained.  Also, some of the stories contradict others.

Still, there is one story (strangely enough, one not originally written for this antho) that would merit attention from future scholars: "Night of the Cooters" by Howard Waldrop.  A typical Waldrop tale, it stands well above most of the rest.  Two other stories were worthy of mention, "Roughing it During the Martian Invasion" by Daniel Keys Moran and Jodi Moran, and "The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Interpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson's Poems: A Wellsian Perspective" by Connie Willis, which, as you can probably guess, doesn't take things all that seriously.

This post was originally going to be entitled "name recognition and the apocalypse", and was going to tell the tale of how some markets now begin to recognize my name an bump my stories up for faster reading.  The upshot?  I get my rejections faster! 

(which is a very, very good thing BTW - to sell stories, you need to have them under consideration by markets that will buy them, and not sitting in the slush at a market that will pass on it!  So quick turnaround = quick sale, even if it ends up selling at a different market).

But I decided that all of you already know that, and instead am going to use this space to gloat.  Sure, all of you may be sitting in summer whiile I'm bundled up and cold, but I have news for you.  The shortest day of winter has already come and gone. From now on, I'm getting minutes more of daylight every day.  Where are they coming from?  That's easy: we're stealing them from you warm, frolicking people in the northern hemisphere.  And there's nothing you can do about it.

Bwahahahaha!

Anyhow, having made it clear that I need to get out more, I give you my writing stats for last night:  500 words in Siege, 550 into an SF story and 159 into the translation.

And if you feel that today was shorter for you than yesterday...  That's because it was.