Happy Birthday, beloved!

Well, Omaha turned 29 today and she's never looked lovier. This despite the black eye she got this morning when she hit a bus (rather than the other way around) face-first, face-down, when she had a seziure. Apparently, Kouryou-chan was brave and reliable in the face of crisis, and everyone got home that evening without more crises arising.

I tried to get her a gift certificate for a skydive from Kapowsin's, but they never got back to my email question and for obvious reasons I couldn't drive down there last week when I had scheduled time to go, so she'll have to make do with my hand-written IOU on her birthday card.

We went out to the Keg and ate too damned much, and it was a good evening. And now it's time that I cleaned the kitchen.

[Writing] A schedule, of sorts.

Okay, after the release of Vishinu, I have five more stories that are more or less in the final stages of development. Those are, in order, Ruffles and Revenge, Strawberries, Overextended, and The Taking of Gabrielle (parts 1 and 2).

Let's see. February, March, April... Great. I need to decide long before April 15th if I'm going to finish The Kemper Assignment or just delete it and go straight into a trio of shorts (A New Home, Residents, and Razing Castles) before tackling one of the biggest things I have, The Lost Crew of the Palantir. That'll be a fun one.

I'm a little concerned about posting The Taking of Gabrielle. It was first written in 1995, and the rewrite was done in 1997. It doesn't "feel" like my current style at all, so I'm not at all sure if I should try and re-write it again or just post it as-is. It's copy-edited and everything now; it just doesn't have the right... I dunno. Maybe I'll just post it anyway. The Kemper Assignment is a sequel of sorts to Taking..., and it too suffers from a disconnect in the way the series has evolved, but it's more amenable to fixing.

THE Instructions.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Instructions to Everything.