Oh, it's nice to be writing short stories again. I even have half a dozen things in the mail (at F&SF, Interfictions, Polyphony, Fantasy Bookspot, Logorrhea, and Escape Pod). It's not quite time to invoke the voodoo on any of these submissions, but I do hope to hear back from some of them soon, especially if they have news of the "Yes, we'll take it" variety.

This weekend I started writing a fantasy story for an antho I've been invited to, and it's about 1700 words along, with many thousand more to go. It features Marla Mason (heroine of those novels I sold to Bantam last month), since she's a character I've naturally been thinking about a lot lately. The second Marla book involves a sanitarium/prison for insane sorcerers -- people too powerful and dangerous to leave wandering around loose -- called the Blackwing Institute (a little cross-dimensional shout-out to the Black Wing, the military compound where supervillains and crazy superheroes are confined in my story "Captain Fantasy and the Secret Masters"). The Blackwing Institute features in this story, too, as does its director, the enigmatic Dr. Husch, and one of her inmates, who is less enigmatic and more, hmm, what's the phrase, batshit insane. The story isn't very far along, and it could run off the rails and explode into a fiery mess of non-story, but it's fun so far, and I have high hopes.

Been reading Kim Newman's The Man from the Diogenes Club, which is mostly wonderful ("The Serial Murders" doesn't do much for me, but I like or love the other stories), and have Greg Keyes's The Blood Knight awaiting me.

The weekend was nice. Exceedingly quiet. Heather and I did our weekly amble to the Farmer's Market on Saturday, and went swimming at Dimond Park on Sunday. Summer's here. There's a lot to be happy about.