I think, just for the hell of it, I'm going to try to finish up two stories by the end of January.

The first story is the one I was talking about yesterday, codenamed "Drinker," which I'm working on for an anthology invite, and the second one is one I was gonna do for that antho, but decided against it, and now I want to finish it to see what happens. The second one is tentatively titled "Some of that Old Forest Magic."

It's always fun when a story (or three) bites you, and you have to keep at it to figure it out. It's been a while since that's happened to me, so I'm pretty psyched about it -- I've been in novel-writing and novel-revising mode for pretty much the past year (along with simply being worn out from crazy sleep-deprivation from Drew's first year with us!). At least the two or three stories I wrote last year turned out well.

I also managed to finish up a new story for Polyphony 6, sent off a freshly rejected story to F&SF, and emailed another story to Fantasy Magazine. Not a bad day -- I'm up to four stories in circulation. Woo...

Stories are great for that rush of ideas and the relative ease of tying together plotlines -- usually a story only has to do three or four things, while a novel does like eight or ten (or it does three or four things repeatedly, over time).

I'm blathering, I know, but in any case, it's nice to finish something. Feels like my novels are never finished! Except when they get published, o' course.

Later...