At Galaxy today, I bought...

• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Complete Fairy Tales - ha-ha, 210 stories to knock off!
  
• October Locus
  

Then I moved on to Abbey's and bought Judith Beveridge's Wolf Notes, because for some strange reason I need poetry right now, and poetry that doesn't read like cryptic-crossword clues.

The Grimm is introduced by Padraic Colum. The first sentence might have been saved from snortoverable incomprehensibility by a single comma:

In the place where the storyteller was the coming of night was marked as it was not in towns nor in modern houses.

Then again, perhaps not. It continues:

It was so marked that it created in the mind a different rhythm. There had been a rhythm of the day and now there was a rhythm of the night....[sic the four-dot ellipsis] The storyteller seated on a roughly made chair on a clay floor did not look unusually intelligent or sensitive. He certainly did not look histrionic. What was in his face showed that he was ready to respond to and make articulate the rhythm of the night. He was a storyteller because he was attuned to this rhythm and had in his memory the often repeated incidents that would fit it....[sic second four-dot ellipsis] These notions were in the present writer's mind once upon a time when he sat in a cottage where the tradition of storytelling was still in being.

I thought to myself, 'Someone must have translated this from the French - someone who didn't know about punctuation.' Gawd. The twee sloppery of it.

And who's this male storyteller? The commentary at the back doesn't mention a single male person from whom the Grimms obtained stories. Do your homework, Padraic.

Fortunately the stories themselves seem OK.

Misreadings at Galaxy that might be useful:

• 'Four and Twenty Blackheads' - sorry, Cherie Priest
  
• 'The best book about cleaning ever written' - oops, sorry, that was 'cloning'
  

Story ideas:

• A spec-fic reworking of Ted Egan's The Drover's Boy
  
• A story about a cat-herder
  

ThenIcamehomeandordered
thetwoGeorgeSaunderscollections
fromAmazon.

I know, I went crazy. Sometimes you just have to.

Slightly less self-indulgent things I did today:

• Booked myself in to do the [shorter, flatter version of the] MS Sydney-to-Wollongong bike ride on 6 November.
  
• Taught myself to make bullet lists - oh, you noticed?