Today was my first Thanksgiving, which is a little odd because I'm not American and I don't live in America. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be giving thanks for. Perhaps the fact that a bunch of religious extremists left England to go and bother someone else. Perhaps for the annual massacre of turkeys (in England we wait until Christmas for that particular joyous occasion). Anyway. I enjoyed it a lot. We had a few friends around. We cooked shepherds pie, tacos and a salsa filling, and Steph made pecan pie. Nika got too excited about having guests and had to be shut in the bedroom. I've no idea if that's the way Thanksgiving is supposed to go, but it's now a new tradition here.

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I've been stuck in writing limbo for too many weeks now. I need to start a new novel, but I don't have ideas that are sufficiently developed to throw myself in. (I've done the throwing into the depths of ignorance before and it's a long struggle out again). I have two ideas that I'm thinking about: a contemporary fantasy and a contemporary kids novel (fantasy, I guess). The adult book will probably need the most work. A couple of days ago I wrote a prologue for the kid's book. I've no idea whether I'll keep it or not, but the advantage of that tentative foray is that it forces me to think through the issues of the story that I wouldn't necessarily think about if I was just plotting. I have realised that I have two completely separate speculative ideas for the novel. Conventional wisdom says that you can only have a single "gimme" in a story. (A "gimme" is the unlikely idea that the readers are willing to let you have on credit when you start a story. Conventional wisdom says you can't have more than one. You can't have, say, elves and faster than light travel. But then what does conventional wisdom know?) So, I'm taking two of these "gimme"s. The challenge is to try to link them and to make the reader give me both of them. Oh yeah, then there's the plot and the characters and stuff like that. And writing the book. But those things are trivial, right? They're just writing.