1. There have been a hundred things that I’ve wanted to tell you in the time since I last wrote here. 2. I have a new job. 3. I was sick for a week. 4. I was busy playing text adventures with strangers and friends. 5. I was reading. 6. Here is a list of what I’ve read since AWP, mostly over lunch: Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson, Motorman by David Ohle, Theater State by Jack Boettcher, RASL 3 by Jeff Smith, Adventure Time issues 1 & 2 by Ryan North and pals, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting, The Next Right Thing by Dan Barden, My Only Wife by Jac Jemc, some of Matt Bell’s Cataclysm Baby, some of Humboldt’s Gift. 7. If you would like to say something about one of these books then I would like to hear it. I have enjoyed them all a lot. (Well, I had my issues with RASL.) (I am trying to withhold judgment on RASL.) 8. I wanted to tell you about Brian Oliu’s Level End, which is stranded at my in-laws’ home because of a Paypal snafu, and which has an actual Gold Edition, supplies limited, with video, audio, glorious NES-style art, etc. 9. My friend Carrie Murphy has a book coming too. It is made of fun, pretty, sticky, weird, nervy, sexy poems; some of them I have known and loved for a long time. 10. My wife and I saw H. Jon Benjamin and David Cross from a distance at a bar during the Mission Creek festival. (We were selling magazines and toy snakes. We were eating chicken salad and fish sandwiches.) My wife couldn’t stop smiling. We have spent a lot of time listening to H. Jon Benjamin’s voice. 11. When you come to this blog do you sometimes feel stressed out and angry about how much time everyone else is finding to read? Sometimes I feel that way when I come here. 12. And sometimes I am glad. 13. I’ve been playing lots of Dark Souls. We could talk about that too. So far there is nothing in it as strange as the best parts of the first game. Unlike the rest of the world, it seems, I am a little disappointed. 14. There is nothing more humbling in its arbitrariness than truly good news. 15. Soon I will write here about the handful of design mistakes that every press, yours probably included, is making. 16. Sometimes waiting to hear back about a book I am submitting feels like waiting to find out if I am dead or alive.