This morning was the first in many a week in which I managed to get my carcass out of bed before 5 a.m. and get some writing stuff done. I’ve been doing lots of thinking about my current novel, so all that time wasn’t necessarily lost, but I was getting really antsy to get back to work.

Problem was, I sort of knocked my back out of whack. To the point where one morning, I could barely get out of bed. The best I could do was a pretty ungainly roll to my right, with teeth clenched so I wouldn’t scream like a damsel in distress.

After a week of rest, heating pads, and muscle relaxers (yay drugs!), I slowly started feeling better, and I was no longer shouting in the middle of the night if I moved wrong. First it was our dog hurting his neck, then me. I think just about everyone in our house was falling apart the past few weeks.

Luckily, all of that is more or less behind us now. Even Whit the Wonder Pup is back to about 75%.

Along with thinking a lot about my book, I’ve also been reading a great book: Territory, by Emma Bull. See the lovely cover over there on the right. The book is a wonderful mix of amazing historical research, vivid characters, some nifty Western wildness, and very cool, yet understated magic. Yeah — Wyatt Earp as a dark sorcerer. And the two protagonists facing off against Earp, Jesse Fox and Millie Benjamin, are fast becoming some of my favorite fictional characters.

The only problem is that I’m two chapters from the end, and the book is only part one of a two-book (three-book?) series. Nobody told me. That’s not cool, man!

And finally, I just can’t help myself but share a couple lines from my own book, lines that summarize the book nicely:

From behind the plate, No Small Foot the Indian flashed a sign for the next pitch to our colored pitcher. A burly Mexican man stood at first, a white woman covered second, and a lanky amber-skinned fellow from the Philippines played shortstop. A Jew covered third. In the outfield, a compact Japanese man waited in left field, a light-skinned Negro with feathers in his hair paced back and forth in right field, and the man I knew only as Mack prowled center.

The World’s All Nations Team, the posters called us.

More on all this later — I didn’t even get to talk about how I plan on spending the 2nd (of 3) installment of my advance for A Gathering of Doorways! Hopefully, I’ll do just that, but in shorter journal entries…!