Let's see....since last I blogged, my brother came down to visit me in Miami for a week, I got some long-standing story revisions done and I finished teaching my Summer A classes at Miami-Dade College. The last night of my Tuesday-Thursday Intro class ended up being held out on Sharky's, an outdoor bar by the bay. (A student suggested it, possibly half in jest, I put it to a vote and, finding no "nay" votes, we walked down there.) We did in fact have a pretty much normal class out there--we took a quiz, I passed back the old one, we chatted about philosophy, and I left to go to another bar next door at the end so they could fill out their evaluations. Still, the change in atmosphere made it a remarkably pleasant way to end class.

Now, after a pretty much literally sleepless night (*very* early flight), I'm back in Madison for Maureen's Write By the Lake class. This is my third visit to Madison in the last thirteen months, and it feels *very* strange to be here and not have WisCon be going on, but it does feel very right to be starting some sort of writing workshop at this particular time of the summer. Beyond that, it works well as an activity for the first week of the Clarion West writeathon. Plus, it should be, y'know, fun. Maureen told me at WisCon that she does her office hours out by the lake, with beer, which (not that I personally drink beer) certainly sounds like an appealing image.

Meanwhile, I've gotten the first couple of pages done for my first writeathon story, tentatively entitled "Red String, Black Night"--think Lovecraftian cosmology plus Lurianic Kabbalah plus fantasy world plus robot uprising. As my classmate Ian once told me last year after I ran by him a structurally similar description of a story I was working on at the time, "Hmm. Sounds cool. Or, possibly, deeply confused."