It’s spring in California. I’m back after a week in New York City and a week on Grand Turk Island out at the tip-ass eastern end of the island chain off FLA that starts with the Bahamas.

The reason I was in NY was to participate in the naming ceremony for my daughter Georgia’s daughter Althea! (Photo by father Courtney.)

A really good crop of relatives arrived, here I am with another of the babe’s grandfathers, Bob Lasseter.

And here’s father Courtney Lasseter with his birth-mom Fran.

We stayed in a fairly nice relatively inexpensive hotel in midtown NY called the Gershwin. This is a view down the block.

And here’s a view out through the rippled-with-age window glass in our room. The room had bare, worn-with-age wooden boards for the floor. Daughter G said it looked like a halfway house for recovering heroin addicts.

I spotted two UFOs; one was in the 28th St. subway station where I got some icons for use in Mathematicians in Love a few months back.

The other was on the floor of St. Patrick’s cathedral.

We hit the kids’ clothing department at Macy’s of course.

And the Rockefeller Center.

Gino Severini, it has a great title, “Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin.”

Another Severini detail. The medium is “oil and sequins.”

A bit of the Picasso’s “Girl Before a Mirror.” Makes me want to get out my paints! Conversely, it also makes me feel like it would be pointless to paint anything else…

And there’s a Dali sculpture with ants. I plan to have a (male) character looking like this in my Postsingular novel. The ants are eating the orphids as fast as they land on the guy, making him invisible in the orphidnet.

I did some business in New York, visiting my trusty agent Susan Protter, also my editor John Oakes at Thunder’s Mouth (Avalon Publishing), and my editor Dave Hartwell at Tor Books. It looks like Tor will publish Postsingular, and I’m waiting to hear if Thunder’s Mouth will pick up my new story anthology, with working title Mad Professor.

Waking up in the middle of the night before, I’d wanted to take that title back, thinking it was too self-deprecatory, but it does have something juicy and archetypal about it, also somewhat transreal and apt — although, harrumph, I’m far from mad.

I’m kind of happy to be writing two cyperunkish hard-SF books in a row, first Mathematicians in Love and now Postsingular. Getting out on the road and doing those concerts. I’m still somewhat stressed out about finding a good plot for Postsingular — I got into the book in a somewhat ass-backwards way, by writing two short stories (back stories) that won’t in fact be in the novel. I appreciate, by the way, all the useful comments you readers have made on the book’s themes.

Not that any of these means much compared to seeing Althea!