I'm supposed to be working on the Bridge novel, but yesterday I gave into my recently mounting desire to finally write a story that's been percolating in my mind for years. It's a sort-of sequel to "Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters" (set in the same world, with the same protagonist, anyway), some years after the events of that story. It concerns gradually worsening US governmental atrocities, the mentality that might makes right, the gradual realization of my main character that the operation of the military/industrial machine has become too repugnant for him to endure, Huey Long's famous observation that when fascism comes to America, it will do so wrapped in an American flag, Thomas Jefferson's observation that every generation needs a new revolution, the notion that old men make poor revolutionaries, the fundamental weirdness of all those "teen superhero" groups... and secret government prisons on the moon.

Yeah, secret government prisons. On the moon, rather than in Eastern Europe, but I think I can winkle out the subconscious reason it suddenly seems important for me to finally write this story. I did the first 2,000 words yesterday and it was easy. Don't worry, it won't be polemical or have some allegorical one-to-one correspondence with current political issues, mostly because I had extensive notes for the story dating back a couple of years, and I'm mostly sticking to them. It's just... distressing how reality is coming more and more to resemble my rather dystopian superhero universe. The whole notion of superheroes lends itself easily to considerations of fascism, I think. I'm hoping to have a draft of this done by the end of the week, and since most of the structural stuff is solid in my mind, it shouldn't take long to reach final form. And the break from the Bridge novel might serve to rev me up about working on that book again.