Wow. I just finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and I just...wow. I mean, that's all I can say. Wow. I can see now why it garnered the Pulitzer Prize. Everyone should read this book.

Chabon does a phenomenal job, among many other things, with his settings. He paints New York City in the 30's and 40's like he was there, as well as Prague and Antarctica. Each setting is fully realized, and it makes the story that much more concrete, whether based on factual information or not. And that got me thinking about cities again.

Ol' Mike Jasper is doing Intracities, an anthology that has endless possibilities, as long as the author sets the story in their hometown. (By the way, you all have until the end of this month to submit your stories, which you should.) And Forrest Aguire's newest in his Leviathan anthology series will contain the cities theme. It's interesting that these two undertakings were announced completely ignorant of the other, yet using the same theme. Though where Intracities is constrained to the 2000 to 2500 word range (which is immensely challenging to pull off), Leviathan 4 is restricted to the 5000 to 20,000 word range.

I've already submitted "Enlightenment" to Mike, and have just started thinking about the process of the story for Leviathan (which I talked about a little in the previous entry's comments). I said I was going to resurrect a story I wrote seven years ago, with a character that looked (though certainly not acted) like my big influence at that time, John Kessel. Then I thought that instead of the postapocalyptic SF/Western bounty hunter story that was originally there (and really cliched), that I would set it in the far future where the buildings stretched up into the clouds, and where our hero had to descend to the muck of the lower sections of the city to find his target. But this also seemed a little cliche.

So now my protagonist will be Dane, a fire elemental who appears (in a rather supporting role) in "Wicked Game" and "Watersnake, Firesnake". He's been kind of a mysterious sidekick in those stories, and I really want to find out more about him. Also, instead of setting the tale in my fictional far-flung city of Ragh (which sounds a bit like the noise made while vomiting), I'm going to put the story in Singapore, or Bali, or both. Since I'll be going there in a week, I'll get to do all sorts of first-hand research. Plus, both locations are pretty exotic to those of us on this side of the world, and I'm betting that Mr. Aguire won't be getting many stories set there. I still don't know what will happen in the story, or why, but I've a good place to start.

And I'll be writing it longhand.

In other news, I sat in Borders the other night with a blank journal and my new pen, and wrote a poem inspired by "Scarlet", painted by my immensely talented girlfriend. If we can coordinate it, I'd like for us to be able to put it out as a Christmas card this year. I've also started compiling all my poetry - which was scattered across different hard drives and filing folders and illustrated presents for family - into one notebook titled, rather pretentiously, The Synthesis of Hyacinths and Biscuits, after a quote by Carl Sandburg. I have no illusions about the quality of my poetry, but they were things I felt I needed to express, and I'm glad to be collecting the poems all into one place, even if I'm ever the only one who reads them.

Tonight I will see X-Men 2 with my best friend Jason Miller (no, not this guy), and tomorrow I will spend Mother's Day with my parents then gather with my fellow Cup-a-Prosers for a long overdue meeting. My last weekend before leaving to see my beauty.

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Now Reading:
The Melancholy of Anatomy by Shelley Jackson

Stories Out to Publishers:
9

Books Read This Year:
19

Novel Word Count:
9200