• I heard an owl the night before last, and again last night. I was indoors. The owl (need I say?) was not. The call was clearly audible for several minutes. Creepy as hell, also pretty cool. It was a Great Horned Owl, for those wondering. Yes, I looked up the call online. I resisted the urge to play back the recording outside to see if the owl would answer.
• I'm having more trouble than usual with mistaking words for other words containing the same/similar letters. With fantasy names and geography (Nirmana versus Rimarn, to make up an example) this is merely distracting.  With regular words in non-fiction reading, the results can bring reading progress to a screeching halt as  my brain tries to process what the word "pickle" is doing in an article about city planning. (not making that one up.) Brains are weird.
• The latest in random searches:
  • blackberry plant genus
  • plot of Pericles
  • historical men's sock styles
• Dream geography: I visited the beach town for the first time in a while. There's an old-fashioned park by the door motel, and a beach hidden behind huge dunes, with huge breakers and a permanent monstrous storm about to hit, and lots of little shops always boarding up their windows. This time there I got to pet lots of cats.
• ::deep breath:: Did a second pass on reading the editorial letter and browsing line edits, still thinking through possible changes. I feel like a kitten rolling in a large ball of string. Happy, excited...and more than a little daunted by the task of untangling it all. I can do it.  The question is, can I do it in time to release in February? Here's hoping.
• Must-share site of the moment -->Gods In Color  This site is packed with amazing info about historical research into Greek & Roman sculpture. Discovered it in a New Yorker article, "The Myth of Whiteness In Classical Sculpture. SO COOL.
•  Random cat pic:
• I watch Law & Order reruns as a kind of brain-free decompression It lets me keep police/legal fiction tropes and themes readily available for writing my cozy mystery while resting the wording part of my mind. It ran so long it's a fascinating snapshot of American social development through pop culture. It's  freaky and painful to see the evolution of so many harmful crime myths  over that twenty-year run.
•  Speaking of pop culture...media update!
  • Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse. My only regret: I have to wait AGES for the next one to come out.  First-person present tense. Two things I do not usually enjoy, but which worked beautifully for the protagonist and the world.
  • At last I have finished the Inheritance trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. I started it ages ago, but had to set it aside until I could embrace new characters in the second book.  I was ready, and I gobbled down the remaining two books super-fast.
  •  Night and Silence by Seanan McGuire because I knew it would be delicious and crunchy and satisfying, and it was.
• Miracle Water infomercials disturb me on so many, many levels. From its usurpation and warping of Christian faith into commercial product (far from a new thing, always horrific in every incarnation) to its reliance on magical thinking, survivorship bias and other logical fallacies, they are sad and scary.

That's all the all there is for now.