Man, I need to let up on the Tori Amos CD -- the opening piano riff on her song "Tear in Your Hand" just keeps running through my head today. And I just had a "duh" moment this morning when I heard the line "If you need me, me and Neil will be hangin' out with the Dream King," and remembered the "Sandman" connection there. Which of course had me all nostalgic for that time, reading comics in the early '90s. Gaiman was quite the young punk, writing those kick-ass comics when he was barely 30.

Must fight the urge to go to comics store and buy all the Sandman and Books of Magic collections...

Some cool news to report -- my story "Riverrun Alley" is up at MarsDust, right next to a tale by good ol' Hey Trey, the man of a thousand pseudonyms. Looking forward to reading his story.

I reread bits of mine and had that weird "did I really write this?" feeling -- that's been happening more and more lately, as I write faster, I guess. At least it was a pleasant feeling, as opposed to "Oh shit, did I really write this piece of crap?"

Lots of little bits and pieces of news to report in addition to my story running (thanks Steve N.!) -- I'm going to the Strange Horizons workshop at the end of September, up in Jersey, and I'm looking forward to that. I need to write a story for that, by the way. I need to decide between the Bridge story, the Witch story, and the Historical Baseball with an Alien story. Choices, choices, choices.

I also need to get some more work done on the Medusa story, which is due at the end of August, and I'm hoping to revise the superhero story of mine per the editor's notes on it and resubmit it to the new antho. Gah! Too much to do, and me up to my eyeballs in novel revisions.

Speaking of novel revisions, I've finally nailed down the revised opening to the Wannoshay novel, and I'm quite excited about where it's going. I did lots of shuffling, and I have a couple new scenes to write, but by tomorrow the first 1/3 of the book should be close to being locked down. It's been a surprising amount of fun, actually.

If anyone has the time or interest, I'd be quite appreciative if you'd take a look at the opening chapters. I've had a couple people whose opinion I highly respect tell me that the prose of the opening chapters was a bit dull and lifeless. I've been working hard to jazz things up and do less infodumping and the like. Interested? Drop me a comment here or shoot me an email. I can send you the first 50-80 pages, depending on how ambitious you feel. :) And as always, I'll gladly reciprocate the read for fellow writers. Thanks!

Finally, and I know I shouldn't even be THINKING about this, but I had a crazy idea for the upcoming Novel Dare in September. I don't want to say too much about it, as it's just an idea and probably will never fly, but suffice to say I'm thinking about it and thinking of the best way to approach some folks to make the Dare really interesting. More on this as things progress... (evil chuckling ensues) Later!