I'm running late, got a date with a Charles de Lint book in the living room next to Elizabeth and a nice roaring fire, but just wanted to drop in and say howdy.

Howdy. Got some good writing done today, at last. I was getting a bit antsy, not churning out the new wordage after last week's DraftFest '03, so today, without really meaning to, I started a new story.

This is actually a collaboration, so it's not as spontaneous as it sounds. Fellow writer Derek James and I are co-writing a near-future story about terrorism called "The Shadow Wolf." It's been a lot of fun, thanks to Derek's excellent outlines and ideas, and some cool research and articles we've been finding about the different topics in the story.

So I ended up writing about 1,000 words on that, drafting the first scene, and then just now I revamped the opening chapters of Heart's Revenge so it's not so durn slow. That was fun -- I enjoy moving stuff around and tightening it. I added about 500 words, cut about 1,000 or so, so the total wordage came out 500 words less... Ah hell, does anyone really care about this wordcount obsession you have Mike???

I also read Cemetery Dance #41, and was somewhat underwhelmed. First off, there's way too many articles -- do they need TWO movie/media columns, and 5-6 pages of out-of-date Stephen King facts? -- and the fiction itself tends to get a bit buried.

But Brian A. Hopkins has a fine, detailed story called "Communion with the Worm" that has a wicked feel to it (but he breaks what I thought was a cardinal rule in writing with the end, having a first-person narrator die...?). "KOTL" by Ron Sering and "Indian Rain" by Chris Brevard were well-written but much too predictable, and "The Local People" by Phil Rickman did little for me. Best of the issue was Steve Vance's "Special Effects," about a professor who uncovers a chest full of old, old films, including one by his eccentric grandfather, starring some psycho named Jack... Nicely done. The Hopkins is a close runner-up for best in the issue. The rest don't hold up well in comparison.

I guess I'm in critical mode still from doing reviews for Tangent Online -- they needed some reviews for the past few months, so I figured I'd do December and January's Strange Horizons, and I was not disappointed. Great stuff!

And that's all for today. More reading and writing, nothing too exciting, really. But I enjoyed it. Later!

Now Playing:
"The Rising", Bruce Springsteen

Now Reading:
Forests of the Heart, Charles de Lint

Stories out to Publishers:
20

Today's Words:
1,500

Novel Words:
20,100

Words for '03:
15,500

Today's Quote:
Describing a long arc across the mountainside with his binoculars, Charlie found the locations of the four remaining signs Vic had left, while Charlie was giving his final lecture with the assistance of the young Customs interpreter. From this distance he couldn’t see the broken tree branch to the east, the scuff marks left by the pieces of carpet attached to Vic’s boots to the south, the piece of cigarette smaller than a clipped fingernail near a gap in the mountains, or the freshly-displaced rocks not thirty meters from where Vic was resting. But he still knew where each sign was; he’d had the landscape memorized within an hour of his arrival, three weeks ago. He could’ve walked to each sign that he and Vic had agreed upon with his eyes closed.

But none of the soldiers -- other than skinny Korolov, that was -- were seeing them.