I used to keep meticulous paper journals, writing every day; then I started blogging, which was the death of my paper journal; and now tweeting seems to have killed my blogging! Anything I have to say, I merely tweet. Eventually I will probably move on to writing a single word on a fogged mirror every three months. But I do miss blogging, so, here I am.

Actually, I have a better excuse than mere technological migration. I've been work-work-working. In the past two weeks I wrote about 10,000 words of a new novel project, which -- once I revise it and put together something resembling an outline for the remainder -- I'll send to my agent. (Sent it to a couple of first readers last night, and they got back to me already -- their responses were hearteningly positive. And I'm having the time of my life with the story.) If she likes it as much as I hope she does, we'll start trying to sell the thing. I hope somebody snaps it up. I'd love to finish it.

I've done about 6,000 words of another novel, in a very different sub-genre, too, and need to do a few thousand more words and an outline for that as well.

I've been finishing up the last loose ends on my Sympathy for the Devil anthology (still waiting on four or five contracts to come back to me, and I need to write an intro and maybe brief story notes). That's almost done. And I have some minor revisions to do on a work-for-hire audition piece by the 4th of September.

All that stuff should be wrapped up in a few weeks, and then: I can write stories! I've got a couple of pieces promised to anthology editors that are due in earlyish 2010, and a couple of other story ideas I'm eager to write just because. That should keep me occupied through year's end.

And, of course, Bone Shop chugs along at the rate of 3,000 words a week or so. It's about halfway done now.

I'm having fun with all this. Things are still kind of terrifyingly precipitous in other ways, but my wife's got an interview for a very cool job next week, and we're really hoping that works out. She'd enjoy it, and it would pull us back from the brink of financial catastrophe. And, honestly, then life would be just plain good.