Last night around 5-ish in the morning, I finally finished a new short story, for the first time in almost two months. (A week from today would have made it two months exactly.) Entitled "Of Rum, Madness, Thunderstorms and Prayer," it came in at just over 5200 words. (Yep, this is the pirate one, since God knows there won't be enough of *those* in circulation in the coming months.) Not as saleabe as, say, 4K would be, but not as bad as some of what I've written lately either. At least it should at least be well within the limit for the Vandermeer anthology, although this draft at least is a bit over-limit for the Shimmer pirate issue.

I'd had the title and the anscestor of the idea back in December, but I didn't do much with it then. Then, on Saturday, I was mulling over taking another shot at it, and mentioned to the inestimable 3na that I was having trouble coming up with the name of the pirate's captain. We brainstormed about 20 names, none of which sounded right to me, until she finally offered that if I changed the gender it could be Jane or Kate or....

...and, the second the phrase "Captain Kate" bored its way into my head, I knew that *had* to be it. The line fragment of prososy that had been bubbling around my subconscious made a lot more sense now with that detail fixed. "Kate, Captain Kate 498thShip, the most ferocious captain in the western seas, the woman I was going to hell for...." Once Cap'n Kate was firmly established in my mind, it was actually the fasted I've written anything since Clarion. I wrote the first 300 or so words on Saturday afternoon, and the other 4900 on Sunday night. It might well suck terribly (one of the disadvantages of writing in these sudden sprints is that when it's over I have no sense of whether I even like it or not, since I just don't have enough distance), but at least I've got something done.

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In other news, I finally got one of those little lizards you see running around everywhere in Miami to pose for a picture. Sadly, given the size of the lizard and the size of the picture, it's a bit Where's Waldo-y, but what the heck....



And, on Friday after a talk, I was hanging out with various people on the patio outside the Philosophy Department offices on the 7th floor of the Ashe Building, admiring the view of the encroaching evening from there, and I remembered, "hey, I've got a camera in my pocket!"