I just walked in from a ping-pong match with Ryan, where he kicked my ass. If we were in prison together, he could have traded me for smokes. We play best of three, and he took the first game 21-8 and the second game 21-3. Ouch. Kid can take advantage of my really lousy backhand, I tell ya what.
Dancing Barefoot should be shipping in about two weeks.
Holy shit, man. Two weeks.
I’ve been going back and forth between very excited and absolutely terrified. I’ve discovered this interesting thing: when I work as an actor — well, worked, I guess — there is always a point where I just have to let the performance go, and move on. Once it’s been printed, and we’ve moved on to a new scene, it’s totally out of my hands.
It’s very different as a writer. Because I can rewrite things all the time, and because I’m such a perfectionist about everything, it’s very hard for me to look at something I’ve written, especially one of my books, and just walk away from it. I wonder if, in time, I’ll develop the same detachment from my written creations as I have from my dramatic ones?
I made an e-mail announcement list for Monolith Press, so I can let readers know exactly when Dancing Barefoot is ready, what the progress of Just A Geek is, and stuff like that. If you’d like to join, go here. (Topica will try to get you to opt-in for a bunch of spam. You don’t have to do that in order to get my newsletter.)
In other news, there’s a Story about me and G4 in Salon today.
I’m going to plug Salon for a second:
Salon is a great online magazine, and I’ve been a subscriber for over a year (got 6 months of Mother Jones as part of my subscription, too!) and it’s totally worth it.
If you go to read that article, you can hook up a free day pass, to check out the site, or you can subscribe.
End of plug. /mastercontrolprogram
So.
I bet there will be lots of new readers coming to the site today, because of Salon, and I thought it’d be cool to point you at some stuff I’ve written that I’m pretty proud of. Not that it matters, but they’re all true:

• The Trade – I traded my cool Death Star for a lousy Landspeeder.
• Fireworks – I almost set my great great great great aunt on fire one 4th of July.
• We Close Our Eyes – I have the best wife, ever. And she is teh h0t.
• Woah. Three pages of stuff I really like starts here.
• Sax0phone and Chalk Piano – My stepson makes me feel like I’m not totally uncool.

And finally, a Thought For Today:

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
-Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.