Neil Gaiman's most excellent short story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" is in the January issue of F&SF. Read it.

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Gmail apparently targets their sidebar ads to words that appear a lot in the user's e-mails and chats. I began to suspect this when I started seeing a lot of ads for writers workshops (no, Clarion isn't advertising on gmail, these are much more dubious specimens), and it was absolutely confirmed when I saw a costume shop's advertisement for something called the Attack Spider.



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I have been slowly but surely edging toward the final stretch of the current story, which I hope very much to complete before my pilgrimage to the land of ice and snow on Thursday morning. Right now it's hovering right around 3K. I hope, for once, to keep it down below 5K, but as usual, the odds are against it.

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Also realizing that (assuming it comes back nyet from the place it's currently at) I really do need to sit back and do a more substantial revision of "Five Against the Darkness" than I initially did.

It's particularly tough, because I've sent the first couple of drafts of this story to the post-Clarion crit circle, to my local writers group (met this last Thursday) and to a couple of individuals, and I've gotten far-more-than-usually mixed reactions. Out of two of the people who's opinions I respect the most who I sent it to as individuals I got one reaction that it was the best story I'd ever written and I just need to make a few minor points explicit for it to be perfect and one reaction that it was hopelessly confused, the person didn't know what story I was trying to tell, etc.

Guess which crit I really, really want to agree with? ;-)

Now, as usual, the thing to do is to just implement the changes that resonate with me, but in this case I have slightly more mixed feelings than usual. I like the world-building (though I realize the mixture of that much varied real stuff mish-mashed into the fantasy world doesn't work for some people), so I'm not going to mess with that too much, and I think the ending's OK, but at the very least the beginning probably needs some tightening, more-showy-and-less-telly, and some of the subplot arcs could still probably stand some upping of explicitness. So we'll see, but I'm going to try not to mess with it too much.

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And of course I promised the other day, to a tina no less, that I'd finally get Shadowmind revised and out the door by the end of the month. So it'll be a busy break, writing-wise.