So, I stumbled across this announcement of the reading period opening for the Leviathan 4 anthology. "Stories about cities," I said. "Well, hey, I could write a story about a city."

So, I sat down with a fountain pen and a pad of yellow graph paper, and started to brainstorm, and came up with not one, but two, story ideas.

One is just a couple of paragraphs of opening that grew out of a sentence I jotted down while brainstorming: "It was easy to lose things in The City; people seemed to come there for just that purpose." I like it, but I'm not at all certain where it goes next.

The other one is a much more nebulous idea involving a travelling city - just a collection of interesting images. I've always been enthralled by the idea of flying cities, for example, but I remember being disappointed by the last few stories I read that employed the idea, mostly because they really didn't seem to exploit its full potential. Not that I'm sure what the idea's full potential is, but maybe I can find out.

So, now I just need to decide if I'm really going to write either of these, and whether I'm going to let one or the other of them bump the story I'm currently working on. The story that I'm currently working on (its working title is "How Karl Volkswagen Found His Destiny", which will probably not be the final title) is driving me nuts. I have been working on it for what feels like forever. I've put it aside a number of times to work on other things, and twice I've scrapped everything I'd written up to that point to start over. (This third iteration, in which I'm using third person instead of first person narration, seems to be going a bit more smoothly.) Writing it has been hard going, and part of me wonders whether it is worth expending all this blood, sweat, and tears over a slightly humorous coming-of-age story set in a post-apocalyptic Central Florida.

Of course, it is worth it. Or it will be, if I finish the darn thing.

But it's hard to resist the siren call of a shiny new story idea. I think I'll try to split my writing time between the two for a bit, see what takes off.