Vote early and often

Today is the last day of early voting for the March 4 Texas primary. For the Republicans, things are fairly calm and rather straightforward: you go to the polling place and, well, vote. Once.

If you're a Democrat, though, things are rather more tense and complicated -- you get to vote twice (and unlike Chicago, down here, it's legal!): For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Texas Democratic delegates are assigned based on the primary ballot (where you vote normally once) and a caucus at something called a "precinct convention" held the same evening (where you do whatever it is people do at a caucus). The Austin Chronicle has more. So far as I know, though, it's still illegal for the dead to vote. Or caucus. Or whatever.

Anyway, here are the candidates' websites:

Democrat:

Hillary Clinton
Barack Obama

Republican:

Mike Huckabee
John McCain

The glamorous life...

of an author...Last weekend, Cyn and I did the final proof-reading of her forthcoming novel, Eternal. She blogs about it here. It's around 60,000 words and took around eight or nine hours to read (We traditionally do the read-aloud for all our manuscripts - it makes us read more slowly and helps us catch glitches in the rhythm of the language). The cats were generally intrigued. In the photo, you see (clockwise from top) Leo, Blizzard, and Sebastian.

The manuscript is terrific - I won't tell you about it, but will say it's smart, sexy, spiritual, and a little scary. I think Candlewick has scheduled it for Winter/Spring 2009.

To celebrate, today we went with a friend to see Spiderwick. (Yes, we just saw it a week ago and will undoubtedly get it on DVD, but it's a movie that needs to be seen in the theater). Then we went out to Katz's for the Briggs' Brownie Boat.

Spiderwick!

Speaking of sprites...

Cyn and I just got back from seeing The Spiderwick Chronicles at the Alamo Drafthouse. We've been looking forward to the movie, based on the Spiderwick Chronicles books written by Holly Black and illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi, for some time. (We've been fans for some time, and had the pleasure of meeting Holly at the National Book Festival last fall.).

The movie was amazing. The acting was superb (the casting was amazing), the story fantastic, the characters genuine, and the special effects terrific. It was poignant, scary, and just plain wonderful. It's been a while since I've enjoyed a movie this much.

If you like good translations of children's literature into film -- and if you ever want to see more -- go see this movie. You won't be disappointed. (Oh, and buy the books. But then, you've already done that, haven't you?)

Back to blogging...

Cyn has ended her holiday blogging hiatus. Cynsations is back on line with an interview with the Brown Bookshelf folks. Go over and take a look.

She's also got a post up on Spookycyn about our trip to Arizona last week. Many more pictures and details as she talks about Writing in the Desert.