Some nifty stuff going on lately, and it's not even 11 a.m. I guess that's what happens when you're up and relatively productive at the crack o' dawn. Sleep is for wimps!

First off, check out my micro-story, "Exfoliate," over at Jay Lake's Story Word website! Now, before you go getting all critical on me, remember, I wrote this in like 15 minutes! It was a blast, too -- I did a little Googling for it, found some nice tidbits about plants and names (there's an inside joke there in the story about that), and had me a nice short-short. I may have to do that again. As always, Jay Lake has all the cool ideas first. We're just trying to catch up...

Also, speaking of cool ideas, thanks to the ever-helpful Write Hemisphere site, I've been reading about the Save Our Short Story website, which is doing just what its name says -- keep short stories alive. A lot of folks have stopped reading short fiction, and I know I don't read nearly as much as I should (it's good for you, I swear!). So this site is worth checking out. Instead of watching a stupid sitcom rerun tonight, why not read a short story? There's tons of them online -- go check out some of the online magazines where you can read great stories for FREE; I've got some of the best ones on my Links page, bottom left.

In the past two days I've come close to finishing a first draft of my Exquisite Corpuscle story. It's almost there, though I have a lot of loose ends to tie up. As it covers over 60 years of time, it's fairly ambitious, and it will either be a big mess by the time I'm done, or something quite cool. I'm voting on the latter, as I'm incredibly optimistic, to a fault...

And in the real world, tonight we're going to go see one of my favorite bands from the '90s who are apparently still kicking around these days -- local Raleigh boys The Connells! I'm listening to them right now. Hopefully we can get tickets and it won't rain on us, which it's done daily since I think late June. It's at the Museum of Art, which is a nifty venue for live music. They also show movies out there at night, and we need to get there one night for that, too. We're slowly shedding our hermetic ways and being sociable again, now that we may actually have some money and we're not working/studying/writing all the time.

I wonder what other cool things I'll encounter LATER today? I'll keep ya posted. ;)

Now Playing:
"Still Life," The Connells

Now Reading:
China Mountain Zhang, Maureen McHugh

Stories out to Publishers:
15

Today's (and Yesterday's) Words:
1,800

Words for '03:
106,200

Today's Quote:
Once his eyes had adjusted and the tinting on the triple-paned glass had lightened, Mark looked down at his city from the narrow horizontal slit of his window. He thought about expanding the view to cover the entire wall, but the dismal view of other gray housing units stacked around his own, broken only by the distant pink slab of the protective wall, wasn't enough to motivate his curiosity. He'd seen it all before, of course, and even worse, he remembered what life had been like when there'd been no wall. Back when humans still interacted face to face, not through a virtual brain. But without the wall and the complex transmitting equipment and smart tech inside it, the cocoons wouldn't be possible.

As Mark stared, patters of rain began to hit the window. He hadn't even looked up at the sky, but now, when he did, he saw it was a roiling mess of black clouds that pushed away the few remaining puffy white clouds, swallowing them whole like a hungry virus.