New stories posted, but no new ones written recently.

Three new stories: Mice and Malice, The Most Basic Human Need, and Vacuum Dancing. Enjoy!

But... Confession time. I haven't written anything fictional since last Thursday. I'm not sure why. I think it's because I decided to tackle Fragility again and that feels like a brick wall to me. I've never really been able to get into the head of a rich, spoiled, elderly woman (since I'm none of those things) and that's exactly what my protagonist happens to be. By making Fragility a side-line to Honesty, I was hoping that I could take some of the really good energy I generated and re-invigorate it. Maybe not. It's sad, too, because I had some interesting conflicts built up in later stories that require that I get the character of Isabelle Mannheim rolling.

Okay, here's what's up. I feel compelled to finish The Ritacha War, at least, because I've already posted more than half of it and it is, really, well, done. A little spit and polish and the last couple of episodes are ready. After that, The llerkin Revolution will come through. It's short-- only six episodes or so, none of this thirty-something episodes that were RWar.

After that, I wanted to expand out into other parts of the Pendorverse. (Ick. Did I just use that word? I guess I did.) It's not as neat as Ken's little view of it pretends to be. There are still places out there that deliberately have scarcity to appease the egos of individuals (yeah, writers go after Clinton or Bush, but nobody really wants to make a point of Robert Mugabe; we know he's evil. If that's true, why the fuck is he still in power and being feted by The Axis of Weasel?) There are other political factions that have their own agendas. There are evil folks out there; not merely the blindly xenophobic Sinox, but both those who honestly think they're doing the right thing for themselves and their people, and those who are simply vengeful on a universe that has taken away their capacity to be "great" as they see themselves. So I have The Taking of Gabrielle and The Kemper Assignment.

I wanted to write steampunk and mess with the llerkin past some more. So I have The Lost Crew Of the Palantir, which takes some non- heroes and crash-lands them on a distant world where they have to make deals with the locals to assemble enough of their crashed starship to make a gradio and call home.

The more I think about it, one of the subplots of A Century of Solitude is just going to have to go away. A pity: it means I'll have to toss one story written entirely in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets (aren't you grateful?) and my second ghost story.

But it does mean that I'll be able to post Dreamteam Calamities without a qualm. And there's much more to that series than there is to Century.

A lot of my stories are riffs. There's a riff on the old Space:1999 "robots who don't know evil" episode. In my case, it's not "don't," it's "can't," and the tragedy that comes with that particular problem.

Then the next two stories set in the Honesty series, then Fragility 1, then Honesty 4.

After that, the series jumps a thirty millenia into the future for a pair of series: Embrace, Empire, Extinguish and Petri Dish. The first is about half-done; it's about a character who, according to his (Pendor's) culture's beliefs, cannot be killed; for very specific reasons, he realizes that sometimes this belief is not sustaining. The second is a bit of a riff on, well, if you know who, you'll know who fast enough. Here's a hint:

"I know now. I understand why, in your language, the most common profanity you have is 'grief'. When you live like this, with everything material thing available to you, the only thing you have to fear, the only thing you can really suffer from, is a tragedy of the heart." I gave her a smile I didn't feel. "Grief is the only emotion worth hating."

The problem is that I like to bounce around as I come up toward the end of a story. I like to look at different things, come back to it with a fresh feel. Eventually they do get done-- it's just a lot slower than I care to think.

Brain Damage

My Palm broke.

If you're not a PDA user, this is probably meaningless to you. If you are, you know what this means: you've had the equivalent of a small stroke. There is a subset of humanity that can keep its life organized, and there is a subset which cannot. I'm in the latter. My Palm kept everything that was essential, but boring, to me: phone numbers, dates, my schedule, to-do lists, priorities, novels I was reading, my English/Kanji dictionary and drills, bus schedules, birthday and anniversary notices, items of research, notes about what to write about next.

All of that... gone. Most of it was backed up onto the laptop, so I can get at it, but not just by holding something in my hand. Who I know, what to do next-- it's all a horrible jumble. I know today's Wednesday only because Bob Edwards told me so in his usual stentorian tones. Wednesday... I know I'm supposed to pick up my kid today after work, but I have no idea what's for dinner. Without the event clock and alerts, I'm likely to forget when, though. I forgot breakfast and lunch today because I didn't have what was available, accessible.

It relieved me of all the duties for which my organic brain is poorly aligned and would rather not have to do. I'm afraid I'm going to be a ditz until it gets back from the repair center.

As If on Hiatus...

Mega-pouts. My favorite webcomic, As If!, has gone "on hiatus." Damn, and this was absolutely without a doubt the best, cutest, sweetest thing on the Internet. It was good even without the blatant lesbian subtext, but that just made it all the better. Sigh. I hope Mimi comes out with that comic she promised us soon. I need a Hunter & Angela fix, stat.

Sickly...

Suddenly this afternoon my brain fuzzed up, my throat itched up, my nose stuffed up, and my energy levels dropped below the gross national product of North Korea.

Ick.