End-of-the-Month Update

WRITING

September wasn’t as productive a month writing-wise as August, but it was still pretty good. I turned out a decent number of pages, the deal with Ramble House for the short story collection came about, and Livia sold the fourth book in her Fresh-Baked Mystery series. If October goes as well, I’ll certainly be pleased.

READING

These are the books I read in September (minus a couple I read for a competition I’m judging):

THE LAST TEMPLER, Raymond Khoury
EASY COMPANY AND THE BIG GAME HUNTER, John Wesley Howard (house name)
THE BLACK PANTHER, VOLUME 2, Jack Kirby
SUPERMAN/BATMAN: PUBLIC ENEMIES, Jeph Loeb
SUPERMAN/BATMAN: ABSOLUTE POWER, Jeph Loeb
ASSASSIN, Ted Bell
THE RAT PATROL #6: DESERT MASQUERADE, David King (Howard Pehrson)
LONE STAR AND THE CALIFORNIA OIL WAR, Wesley Ellis (Jeff Wallmann)
SOMEONE IS BLEEDING, Richard Matheson
THE GUNSMITH #302: THE FRIENDS OF WILD BILL HICKOK, J.R. Roberts (Robert J. Randisi)
FRIGHT, Cornell Woolrich
THE RUTHLESS RANGE, Lewis B. Patten
GREEN LANTERN: THE GREATEST STORIES EVER TOLD, John Broome, et al.
FANG TUNG, MAGICIAN, H. Bedford-Jones

Not a bad one in the lot. I didn’t write blog posts about all of them, because I was either too busy, too tired, or I wrote about them for the Owlhoot apa and like to have those reviews appear there first most of the time. You can read anything in that list, though, and be assured of some entertainment.

MOVIES

We saw the following movies in September: THE EX, THE MARINE, DÉJÀ VU, WILD HOGS, THE SANDLOT 3: HEADING HOME, OFF THE MAP, 300, and BELIEVE IN ME. None of them are great movies, but certainly none are terrible and all of them have something to recommend them.

On a health-related note, even though I’m on three different kinds of medication, my allergies have been bothering me all month. The past few years I’ve gotten pretty sensitive to ragweed, and this is supposedly the worst ragweed season in this part of Texas in more than fifty years. I check the pollen count numbers every day in the paper, and they’ve been higher than I remember ever seeing them, so I believe it’s as bad as the weather service says it is. The situation probably won’t improve until after the first freeze, which is at least six weeks away and quite possibly longer, since it still feels like summer here no matter what the calendar says.

Other than that, though, September was okay.