I seem to be out of my writing slump. Got decent, if not spectacular, amounts of writing done yesterday and the day before. And today I did a final editing pass on a story that's been waiting for a while for me to give it one last buff and polish and send it out to its first market.

If I'm achieving any great writing breakthrough, I'm not seeing it. But that's okay -- I'm just happy that writing this thing has stopped feeling like pulling teeth.

I noticed that Marissa and I have both been reading Graham Joyce. I finished Smoking Poppy last night. Very engrossing. And some of it takes place along the Thailand/Myanmar border, which was kind of cool. I read a fascinating book about Myanmar/Burma recently, Andrew Marshall's The Trouser People. ('Trouser people' was what the Burmese, who wore sarongs, called the British.) It was neat to see that milieu pop up again. Though Joyce doesn't have any characters nearly as surreal as the Guns-n-Ammo-reading Buddhist monk named Phillip (after Phillips Electronics) who smuggles Marshall's camera and film across the border hidden inside his robes, because even Myanmar border guards won't strip-search a monk.

Yeah, you should really go read The Trouser People. It's like a Bruce Sterling short story, only it's all real.

Anyway, back to Smoking Poppy. It's pretty much a mainstream novel, and I guess I'm enough of a genre bunny to be a little disappointed by that. Or maybe it's just that I didn't like the book quite as much as I liked The Tooth Fairy. I liked it better than Joyce's Indigo, which somehow felt like a Jonathan Carroll novel, only not as good.

I was going to read Brian Aldiss's Helliconia Spring next, but I when I picked it up I realized that it was actually due back at the library 2 days ago. Ooops. So I took it back. It's okay, I have quite a large stack of unread books here.