Well, first with a bit of absolutely shameless and petty bragging: I was just browsing around the Dragons, Knights & Angels forums, and I noticed that my story "The Star Inside the Swastika" got by far more hits that any other short story they've published, at least since September, which seems to be as far back as their archives go. 472 hits isn't exactly the pinnacle of literary achievement, but it tells me that a bunch of people found the story interesting enough to browse the forum topic, and it makes me happy--especially as the next-highest hit count for a short story (354 hits) was for a story that's been up on the web-site for three and a half months longer.

Meanwhile, I'm between weekends out of town. Last weekend, I was in da UP visiting a friend, and tomorrow I'm going off to sunny Miami to meet with the Philosophy Department there. (And, not for nothing, sit on the beach drinking glasses of Rum & Coke with little lime wedges stuck in the rims and getting over my cold and sinus crap.) I'm looking forward to it, after Marquette (a city that is absolutely gorgeous in many ways, but clearly needs to hike up local taxes a bit and invest in a couple more snow plows) and, for that matter, Lansing, which has been hovering in between "mildly unpleasant" and "bitterly cold" of late.

Finally, I think/hope I'm nearing the final stretch for finishing up a new short story I've been working on on and off (mostly off) since January, "Acid Poker," which I've ben thinking of sort of as a cross between "How to Light a Cigar" and "Levitical Laws." (I realize those references wouldn't mean anything to any one but the two or three people who have read every other story I've ever written...but, on the other hand, they constitute about 50% of the readership of this blog, so what the hell.) The basic image its built around is summed up by the name---people playing poker, not for money or chips but for hits of LSD, and gets weirder from there. Its a return to territory (playing with altered states of consciousness vs. altered external reality) from "How to Light..." combined with some slightly more straightforward fantasy bits probably most like "Levitical Laws" in terms of stuff I've previously written (no witches or Baptists, though). Anyway, after going back and forth between three incomplete stories since the last one I finished (not counting the dark sf flash piece), I'm just happy to finally be getting some traction on one of them.

Basically, a couple days ago I randomly took another look at it and realized that if I deleted about half of what I had written and started on a completely different plot path from where it had started to go wrong I could actually get pretty excited about it. Basically, there are no absolutes here, and lots of people have lots of different writing processes that work for them, but for me I always trip myself up if I get too hooked up on clever, well worked-out plot lines in advance instead of being to shoot from the hip and being intuitive about it--like, "what resonates the most with on a gut level at this point in the story" instead of "what gets me to point B." That approach has its disadvantages--I always end up cutting out reams of material along the way that seemed cool at the time but don't have much connection with anything, but it definitely seems to be the lesser evil for me.