The first of May. Four months and counting.

One of the downsides to being a somewhat type-A math geek girl is having a constant awareness of the various numerical milestones unfolding all around me. It's the first of May! And quite aside from the various religious (Happy Beltane!) and humorous (Happy Jonathan Coulton Says You Have Permission To Do That, But Please, Not On My Lawn Day!) implications of the date, today marks the point at which we drop from "more than four months to Rosemary and Rue" to "less than four months to Rosemary and Rue." Yes, this is a big deal, if you're me. Also if you're going slowly crazy from trying to keep track of everything that needs to be accomplished in the next one hundred and twenty-two days.

Pardon me while I flail.

Also pardon me while I open the floor to questions. See, I want to give away a few galleys (and I'll have a longer post about why I have so many, and what's being done with most of them, a little later), and that means I need contests. Suggest things! What do you think would make a good contest? "One that I can win" is not a good answer, by the by.

I leave you with Sonnet 122, because I find structured poetry deeply soothing:

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character'd with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date; even to eternity:
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to raz'd oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more:
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.

—William Shakespeare.

Whew.

Buy Indie Day!

In addition to all today's other awesome features, today is Buy Indie Day, a day to focus on making purchases from all your lovely local independent shops. It's always important to shop at your local stores—it's good for the local economy, as well as often being good for the industry as a whole—but it's even more important in these trying economic times. Remember, the local store you pass up in favor of Amazon today is the local store that isn't there tomorrow.

What's that? You don't have any local independent shops? Well, have no fear! There are, as always, options.

If you're looking for reading material, and you don't have a local bookstore, Berkeley's Other Change of Hobbit and San Francisco's Borderlands Books both do mail order and fill special requests. These are my local stores, and I love them dearly. Plus, they have cats to feed. You wouldn't want to let the kitties go hungry, would you? Think of the kitties! (Two major advantages of the independent bookstore: they often have cats, and they often have bathrooms. If you don't think this is an advantage, you've never needed to pee while in downtown San Francisco.)

If you're looking for some exotic new musical strains to delight your eardrums and confuse your iTunes categories, I can recommend some fun things. Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, for example, provide some truly awesome offerings, ranging from hysterical parody (Aliens Ate My Homework, Retro Rocket Science) to serious and thoughtful original work (Manhattan Sleeps, Moebius Street). I recommend them hugely, and not just because Jeff was the engineer on my latest album. My beloved Vixy and Tony have a rockin' album of their own—I'm even on it!—and I can't really recommend Thirteen highly enough. And of course, there's SJ Tucker, whose works are mythic and tangled and complex and funny and altogether lovely.

What bits of independent awesome do you know about and want to share? Stores? Musicians? Comic book artists? Share, and enlighten the world!