lovely saturday w/ hangovers

Well, that was nice. Today was Bike Lexington, which meant getting up earlier than usual (sadly only for a Saturday) to meet up with our friends Bill and Nathalie for an en masse ride around downtown to encourage shiny happy cycling feelings. That was a good time, except my rear brake kept engaging on hills, something I didn't figure out until it had happened a couple of times and I was convinced I had somehow gotten into the worst shape of my life. Shame breeds silence. Eventually, though, I realized something was actually wrong with the bike. My legs feel like rubber. Etc. The guy who runs our bike shop was around, luckily, and told me to come by and let them fix it after. Big news of the day: I WON A BIKE! In one of those raffle things! Just after complaining about how I never win anything, even though I used to be dead lucky. Oddly, I can only locate a photo on Phat's Japan page, but here's my new seabreeze cruiser -- I chose aqua. It's quite spiffy and this now means we have six bikes for when people come visit. Yay!

Then we had a nice brunch at Alfalfa's, more tooling around, got my brakes tweaked and on to the new wine/gourmand shop, where we got lots of free samples from two Australian guys who are in the U.S. pimping their wines all over the place. (I didn't write down the names sadly, but the reds were especially lovely.) You'll be happy to know, Justine, that the big tall bald one was wearing a cricket shirt and he and Christopher exchanged terminology that meant nothing to me.

Home home home. Nap nap nap. Woke up to see the unbelievably cool cover for the limited edition chapbook we're doing for Wiscon.

If only all days were so pleasant.

Now, the house is a mess. Something must be done about it.

A few linksies:

Alex Epstein thinks that 3 act structure is bollocks and he interviews comedy writer Jacob Sager Weinstein (of Yankee Fog).

Someone picked up Susann Cokal's Breath and Bones on my recommendation. Yay! It's a lovely book and I'll have more to say about it soon.

Jed Hartman takes the occasion of SciFiction's 5th anniversary to sing Ellen Datlow's praises. Add my voice to that chorus. He also points to an old Salon article about Event Horizon that's worth a read. In it, Rob Killheffer says:

"We're not growing a bunch of new readers," Killheffer admits. "The barrier that written science fiction has always had is the willingness of the reader to encounter unfamiliar concepts and do a little bit of work in reading. That barrier is as high as it ever was. 'Star Wars' is evidence that the imagery of science fiction has become familiar to people. They'll buy stories in a familiar world with familiar characters, but there's little evidence that they'll pick up a new world -- even when the book is aimed directly at that audience, telling a similar story of high adventure and using the imagery of science fiction in a similar way. They're not looking for science fiction, they're looking for 'Star Wars.'"

What do you guys think about that?

Miranda July just won the Camera d'Or at Cannes (via the Cinetrix). That makes me very happy.

That's all.