First of all, my apologies for the lack of entries lately. I've been insanely busy with academic stuff for once...among other things, I have about five days left to turn in a dissertation topic, so I can take my qualifying exams next semester.

Fun, fun, fun.

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I just finished my first new story since the Thanksgiving thing, a nasty alternate-history "war on terror" story tentatively entitled "Dark Coffee, Bright Light and the Paradoxes of Omnipotence."

This is a little unusual in a few respects for me. One is that it's an idea-based story, which is a little unusual for me, though I've been doing a lot more of it lately--the Thanksgiving story and the 9/11 story were both of that kind. Like those other two, I spent a *lot* more time than usual letting the story gestate. In this case, I started to play with the idea on the plane back from WisCon--although I then forgot about it for a few months--and all of the last week or two I've been obsessively thinking about it, since a couple of weeks ago I finally got some characters and a situation to be a perfect fit with the idea, and so I've been thinking about that instead of my ongoing w.i.p. I usually write in a fairly intuitive way--I don't tend to outline--but in this case by the time I had to sit down and write it before it burst out the whole thing was pretty much outlined in my head. It remains to be seen whether this was a good thing or not. One clear effect is that it took me a bizarrely short time to write. This is, I think, the only story I've written since Clarion that I've started and finished in a single session.

Secondly, it's only the second story where I've made an effort to take Maureen's advice from this summer to integrate more of my philosophical interests into my fiction. Obviously, it remains to be seen how smoothly that might or might not have been done.

Finally, it's only story where I've had a protagonist who was male but didn't share my sexual orientation. (I've had both straight and gay female protags before, but only straight male ones.) It felt right for the story, but it was hard one for me to write, hence probably being worth the effort to stretch that way more often.

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On a different note, my SFnal pirate story--"On Rum, Madness, Thunderstorms and Prayer"--is going to be in the November issue of Atomjack. I got the galley proofs this week. This makes me very happy.