I wrote 16,000 words over the past six days. (From 8/29 to 9/3 -- I did not write, and do not plan to write, anything other than this journal entry, some tweets, and stuff for work today.) What I accomplished:

• Wrote two book reviews.

• Wrote chapter 10 of Bone Shop.

• Finished sample chapters and a proposal for a novel tentatively titled Death (and other afflictions)

• Finished sample chapters and a proposal for a book in a totally different subgenre tentatively titled An Arrant Thief

• Did revisions to a work-for-hire audition piece.

Fly away, little books, and write when you find work!

All of that stuff had either hard deadlines (as in, readers or editors were expecting them) or soft deadlines (as in, my agent was hoping to get stuff from me before Labor Day weekend) at various points in this past week.

It was a lot of work, but I still found time to read a couple of good books (Alan DeNiro's Total Oblivion, More or Less, Alex Bledsoe's The Sword-Edged Blonde; now reading Daniel Abraham's The Price of Spring), and play some World of Warcraft, and hang out with my wife and kid (the latter now knows words including go, climb, orange, red, green, car, where we goin'?, and more).

I have some work to do the rest of this year, though not immediately -- I have two stories promised to editors in early 2010. One is a Marla Mason story.... and the other is a Bordertown story for the new anthology Welcome to Bordertown edited by Ellen Kushner and Holly Black! The Bordertown books were a huge formative influence on me when I was a 12, 13, and 14-year-old reader, and the chance to contribute to the revival of that world is awesome.

And the wife has a job interview next week that we're hopeful about, so things are, at least potentially, looking up.