Catching Up

I didn't mean to go so long between posts. Work and real life caught up to me in the past week or so. Tuesday through Friday of last week, I didn't do much of anything except sit at the computer and write, so there wasn't really anything to say about those days. I'd set myself a goal of getting to a certain point in the book I'm writing by this past Saturday, because I wanted to take that day off and go down to Cross Plains, Texas, for part of the annual Robert E. Howard Days get-together. If you've noticed the photo just under this post, you know I made my goal (by 3 pages!) and spent Saturday in Cross Plains having a great time seeing old friends and meeting some folks I knew from the Internet but had never met in person. The Brownwood Bulletin even published an article about REH Days, focusing for some reason on the panel I did with Indiana Bill Cavalier. (Thanks to Bill Crider for the heads-up about this.) Indy and I both look quite distinguished, I think. While I was there, I picked up a copy of the new REH collection from the University of Nebraska's Bison Books imprint, BOXING STORIES, edited by Chris Gruber, which restores for the first time the full version of Howard's novella "Iron Men" (the edited version, with 10,000 words cut out of it by Jack Byrne, was previously published in several places under the title "The Iron Man"), along with a good selection of Howard's other boxing stories. This is a very nice-looking trade paperback, with a cover by Gary Gianni.

I spent most of Sunday in the two-foot-tall crawl space under the house rasslin' with balky drain pipes. I got a little claustrophobic after a while. Today was spent going to Home Depot and Lowe's for more ammunition in the Great Plumbing War, as well as stops at a couple of libraries to return books. I plan to get back to work tomorrow and will probably try to do another sprint for the weekend, although I don't plan to go anywhere this time. I just want to get pages done.