It’s mostly in the morning that I can feel the days getting shorter. The cats wake me up every morning right at the stroke of 5:00, and after feeding them I go out on the porch and practice chi kung and tai chi. As we move away from the solstice and towards the equinox, I notice the birds are a little quieter, the eastern sky a little darker. Venus, however, arrives at about the same time every morning, peeking over the edge of my neighbor’s roof.

The truly hot summer weather has arrived, and I am beginning to feel the anxiety, specific to my high school and college  years, of summer vacation being more than half-over, and so much yet to do.

(Narrator: He didn’t really have much yet to do.)

The only new addition to the library is the new book by George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which was a total impulse buy from Amazon as a reward for also buying a pile of supplies for the house and for Zyra’s business. I have never read any Saunders, but I have been aware of him for many years, and the idea of using Russian short stories to explore the arts of reading and writing appeals to me.

(And yes, reading is an art.)

Speaking of, I am almost done with The Road Home, and still loving it. Looking back, I don’t think I have re-read this book in at least fifteen years, and possibly longer.

I am past the halfway point of Automating Inequality, and should have it complete by the end of the month.

In writing news, I took some time this past week to clean out my list of calls for submission to various anthologies and themed issues, and went looking for a few new venues. I mention this not because it means I have been writing, but because I did anything writing-related at all, and that is a definite win for what was otherwise a deeply stressful week.