No, I'm Not in Alaska

I do wish I could have made it to Bouchercon this year, but it just wasn't to be. I think this time last year, Al "Sunshine" Guthrie and I had just stumbled into our shared room in Madison, Wisconsin to discover... um, a single bed. Never so quickly was a call made to a front desk in a hotel to beg for a cot. (Ah, Madison. Good times.)

But that doesn't mean I'm all mopey. In fact, looking back the past 16 hours, I have to say it was a pretty damn good day. By way of proof:

* This morning I edited next week's cover story for the City Paper, written my good friend Edward Pettit. It's the lead story in our Fall Book Quarterly, and it's a riot. (In a geeky, literary way.) Then I saw the cover image the art department cooked up, and it made me laugh out loud. So damn perfect. Wait until you see it.

* Accompanying Ed's story will be a short original piece by none other than Laura Lippman. It's a kind of a rebuttal to Ed's piece. Mystery fans will definitely want to check this out.

* At lunch I went off-campus and read a nice chunk of Kevin Smith's My Boring-Ass Life, a new paperback collection of his blog entries. Very funny, very insightful, and as advertised, very candid. (Almost every entry opens with the same, Zen-like routine: I woke up, I took a dump.)

* After lunch I received a slightly upset call from a Philadelphia Phillies rep, who was concerned over a column we ran this week. But our conversation was friendly, rational, and ended on a good note -- you can't ask for more than that. Part of my job as editor-in-chief is to be the guy to take these calls, and they almost never end like this. Chalk one up for my blood pressure.

* The Bride made Stove Top for dinner tonight. I love Stove Top. If I could snort/inject Stove Top, it would become my recreational drug of choice. (Of course, that would not be good for my blood pressure.)

* Two weeks + one day after surgery, I finally feel normal. And my voice is much different. Go ahead, give me a call. You won't believe it.

* This evening, my daughter and I sat thumbing through a copy of The Marvel Vault, which is this great "museum in a book" of Marvel Comics history. To my everlasting joy, she was able to identify a good number of Marvel heroes on sight -- including The Thing, Spider-Man, Sue Storm, the Human Torch, the Hulk and Ghost Rider. She's four. Someday she'll either thank me, or curse me for turning her into a nerd.

* And finally, later this evening I received an offer from someone who wants to option the film rights to The Blonde. Someone very, very cool. Wish I could say who, but we're just starting the dance, and it's too soon to reveal the name of my (potential) partner.

So like I said: pretty damn good day, considering I'm not in Alaska.