Today I’m very tired, and it is lightly raining, which I appreciate. I wish I had drawn an uglier/weirder chimera, but so it goes. I say that as if I had no control over the situation, but in fact present-me did not. Present-me can look back with bafflement at Sunday-me, and yet the two will never meet. The knowledge of both that I hold in my head is my own personal chimera.

In my garden, a bunch of squash and melons are sprouting; one sprout in particular is large and luscious, and I know that I will fret over it for months, even though we aren’t likely to get a hard frost before February. It may be a fool’s errand to have planted squash so late in the year, but it’s still upwards of 90 degrees here most days, so it seemed worth the gamble. The peas I planted are mostly purple and yellow, strange varietals, and I look forward to all the weird salads I will eat, months hence.

Speaking of chimeric things, in the past couple of weeks we’ve several times gotten rain when the sky was mostly blue: out all my windows, blue, blue, blue, but nonetheless fat raindrops are falling on the brick patio. At lunch today I went out to check the mail and the sky was mostly clear, but the air smelled like water, as surely as if it was raining already, or as if a nearby pipe was gushing water into the road. (This has also happened in recent memory, and indeed the effect is much the same.) As I write this, the sky has just cracked open and the thunder is breaking above me. Now we’re getting hail.

Anyway, a couple of things, which I will report through my fog of exhaustion:

1, I’m doing a virtual reading with a bunch of other women who (at least sometimes, like me) write science fiction/fantasy/horror—it’s called Strong Women, Strange Worlds, and takes place on October 7th at 12pm ET (so yes, 9am for me. I will read and drink coffee! Kind of lovely actually!) There will also be giveaways! You can register here if that rings your bells.

2. My cousin Louis was in a terrific short horror film called Baby Fever which is touring a bunch of festivals in October (appropriate! Halloween! Spooky!)—I’d describe the movie as Carrie meets Cronenberg. (Gross! Unsettling! Wonderful!) If you want to check it out and support young filmmakers, here are some opportunities to do so:

OCT 1st – 📍TUSCON, AZ at Horror Origins fest
OCT 6th – 📍MANCHESTER, UK 🇬🇧 at Grimm Fest @grimmfest
OCT 14th – 📍NYC at Brooklyn Horror Fest as part of the “laugh now, die later” shorts block @brooklynhorrorfest
OCT 15th – 📍LOS ANGELES at Screamfest LA, 10pm showing @screamfestla
@monstrousfemmefilms

(All those account names are from Instagram)

3. Ok, I thought of a third thing; dear dear beloved geniuses Branden Boyer-White and Shannon Watters have a comic out today with BOOM! Studios! It’s a queer YA re-telling of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow (called, appropriately, Hollow) and I am SO EXCITED THAT IT’S IN THE WORLD. You can order a copy here, or at your local comics shop; it’s rad, and you will regret nothing.

That’s it. The clouds are moving rapidly. I can already see blue sky again.