Heat management, also fiveish things.

(The picture is me at nine months. I wonder what I was thinking?)

My air conditioner burned out on Friday of last week. The landlord had to wait until yesterday before someone told her it couldn’t be repaired; it will be another while before I have the new a/c or heat exchanger or whatever it is I end up with. The temperatures have been 90 or so during the day, 70 or so at night. When I grew up, we didn’t have air conditioning, so I am familiar with how you keep a house cool in the summer. The house is well designed for Kansas summers with high ceilings and lots of cross-ventilation. It gets a little sweaty from the late afternoon to about eight, but the rest of the time it’s fine. Today’s supposed to be 93, and I expect it will be awful, but then tomorrow the temps drop and it should be actually pleasant for an entire week.

I have spent the last six weeks grinding at this short story, and suddenly, Sunday morning, the dam broke and I wrote 2800 words in a few hours. The 10,000 I wrote in the month before that, taking apologetic little stabs at story ideas, did NOT end up in the final story. “Ratatoskr” was written for a new magazine I am very excited to be creating something for. Details as soon as I can.

Also good publication news: I was contacted by a Korean agent about publications there. I actually publish more overseas than in the US.

I have been reading the Belgian writer, Jean Ray. My new favorite publisher, Wakefield Press, is publishing fantastic English translations (by Scott Nicolay) of his work, and I am reading them in order. Currently reading “The Gloomy Alley” in Cruise of Shadows — maybe the creepiest story I have ever read. 1931. This is so much better than Lovecraft. So so so much better. Sadly, he is anti-Semitic in the way that Lovecraft was racist, personally and not just systemically, but this story seems comparatively free of it. I will be interested to see if his stance changes as I read later books.