What a year! Lloyd Alexander, Robert Jordan, Madeleine L'Engle - all gone! And Terry Pratchett has just been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's disease. The world of fantasy books still has a few good years from Pratchett, thank God. Now is the time to get to know him through his Discworld series and other books.

I am in Northern California and today we are doing nothing. Yup. That's our agenda for the day. We might visit a winery. We might go to a park and hike. We might read, write, snooze. We might not do anything. We're on vacation and that's what vacationers do.

I just found out that my monthly gig as Book Guru for a local weekly has ended. The company that puts out the weeklies in my area of the East has decided to end several weekly papers - due to lack of interest probably. Those areas were already served by a subscription weekly anyway. The sad thing is, that after a visit to Chrales M. Schulz's museum yesterday, I decided to do an article about comic strips and their usefulness as pre-literacy and early literacy tools, as well as their re-publications as books of collections. I'll leave their efficacy as social commentary to someone more interested in research than I am.

What this means - the end of my writing gig - is that I will have to suffer the rigors of submitting queries and having them rejected - or hopefully accepted. It just adds another layer to the writing process. Oh, well, why should I be any different than all the other writing grunts?

And we are missing some awful weather out East. Yippee! That always makes us feel better -to be on vacation somewhere temperate while snow and sleet batters our home town. Oh drat! I have to email someone and ask that person to clear our walks. And it might mean that we have trouble getting home. I wonder how much it would cost to drive across the country. Nah. Bad idea.