Some roadside flowers blooming even in July and even in this drought. HC publicity people are lining me up for a few readings around Texas. My problem with readings and appearances is that I have animals — two horses, a donkey (anybody want a donkey? I’ll bring him to you, free of charge) and Rita the Whippet and two twin tabby-fellow cats. who, even as I speak are out murdering birds. Despite collars with bells on them.

And so I have to hire people to come and feed, take cats to cat-boarding-place. Friends would do it but you can impose on friends just so much. So there’s a lot of preparation and arranging and so on. Actually I love appearances, readings. It’s an ego-enhancer, a time to play dressup, excuses for new clothes, luxurious nights in places where they serve you food and clean your room. Not bad, not bad.

If they put me up in a Drury Inn I can bring Rita The Whippet.

We’re lucky to have a truly great fiddler here in this small community. Tom Bomer. He operates a cedar-clearing Bobcat and plays at contests and at church. Great voice, too.

Any distraction at all will kill the following fifteen minutes of writing. At my kitchen window, scribbling this sequel to Lighthouse Island by hand, I wonder if the cat is going to fall into the pool.

It’s a 500-gallon cattle tank, on a deck, a little bit of rainforest here in this dry July, and I wonder if he falls in, does he have enough sense to swim to that lawn chair in the water and get out? Of course. There went fifteen, twenty minutes.

Fascinating series of illustrations from about 1890’s; ‘France In The Year 2ooo’. The illustrators tried to imagine a century ahead — interesting how they could not see that social mores might change; our underwater siren has long skirts. And were apparently not able to understand the effects of underwater skirt-drifting and croquet-ball hitting.

There are a good number of these imagingings, just use Google/Bing images ‘France In The Year 2000’. Thus it is with sci-fi, imagining the future, we are always really stuck in our own time, especially in terms of social stuff.