I was up early this morning to take my father-in-law into Fort Worth for some out-patient surgery. I'm not a morning person at all. The rest of the day it felt like the time ought to be three or four hours later than it really was.

The advantage to starting so early was that I was back home early, so then I was able to turn around and go back out, as Livia and I hit four libraries and gathered a large stack of research books for the proposal we're currently working up. We also stopped by Half Price Books, where I found a couple of pretty good deals: a hardback first (no dust jacket) of SLEEP NO MORE, edited by August Derleth, and an ex-lib hardback first, with dust jacket, of Derleth's historical novel THE SHADOW IN THE GLASS. Good prices on both. The store also had a jigsaw puzzle of Frederic Remington's famous painting "A Dash for the Timber", which originally came from the gift shop of the Amon Carter Museum. I had to pick that up, too. And to top it off they had the 50 movie boxed set of "Horror Classics" on DVD, ads for which showed up in my email a few months ago. Most of these are hardly classics, and I'm not a huge fan of cheap horror movies, but sometimes they just can't be beat.

No real work to speak of other than the library visits.

Currently reading THE GOLD MOVERS, a Larry and Stretch Western by Marshall Grover, really the late Leonard F. Meares, a very prolific Australian author of American Westerns. Some of his books were published in the U.S. by Bantam under the pseudonym Marshall McCoy. He wrote over 800 books in his life, and over 700 of them were Westerns (over 400 in the Larry and Stretch series alone). The books are pretty formulaic, but usually very well-plotted and have excellent characterization, especially considering their length, about 35,000 to 40,000 words. I corresponded with Meares for several years before his death in the early Nineties, and he was always optimistic and a true professional. His enthusiasm for his work never diminished, which is unusual in a writing career that lasted forty years. Though he wrote under several different pseudonyms, the most well known one was Marshall Grover, and when our kids were little and watching Sesame Street, I always wondered every time the muppet character pinned on a badge and called himself Marshal Grover, if one of the show's writers was really a Len Meares fan.

I also read the first two issues of THE CIMMERIAN, a new journal devoted to the work of Robert E. Howard, and found them very interesting and entertaining.