First, some updates, then an Announcement.

Update #1: I sold yet another story. "Pale Foxes" will shortly appear at Strange Horizons, which as far as I'm concerned is right up there with scifi.com and Atlantic Unbound with the quality of the work that gets bought there. It should go up sometime in early April.

Update #2: "Antfarm", which along with "Pale Foxes" was one of the last stories I had remaining unsold or unretired from my abortive career as a creative writing major, is up for your viewing pleasure at Jackhammer E-zine.

Now then. Announcement:

For the next thirty days, this journal is being taken over by the same thing that's taking over the rest of my life: the Sporks' 2001 Novel Dare. The Sporks are the critique group to which I belong:

• Karin Lowachee, doing the revisions of her novel Warchild, which won last year's Warner Aspect First Novel Contest and will be out (to much fanfare) in 2002;


• Roger Eichorn, working on the sort-of-historical fantasy Sweet Aliesse;


• Jennifer de Guzman, revising her cyberpunk fantasy All We Ever Wanted Was Everything;
  
• Angela Boord, writing the fantasy My Right Arm; and


• Elizabeth Glover, sans journal, revising her fantasy novel, the title of which I do not remember.

Also joining us are non-Sporks Marsha Sisolak, Steve Nagy and Trey Thoelcke. I'm not real clear on what they're writing.

And me? Prometheus Unmasked, the Very Hard-To-Define Novel. I'm anticipating it's going to roll in at around 120,000 words when it's done, meaning one of two things:

• The way I've been writing lately, it'll probably come in between 150K and 180K


• If I can meet my goal for this month, it'll be half done.

The current wordcount is something like 800 (prologue), and it's going to need rewriting, because the voice in everything except the first paragraph of that sucks ass. Yesterday was really a total bust, because I've got whatever crud is going around, and instead of being sensible and staying home to write (or going to Bibas or Katz's to write), I went out because I was sick of seeing nothing but walls, and ended up staying out till 5.

Then, because I don't know when to leave well enough alone, I stayed up till 6, trying to sort out the driver problems with the CD burner, and screwed up what was starting to look like a stable installation of Windows 2000. I may have to give up on this whole burner idea, more's the pity.

And, to pile inconvenience on top of inconvenience, I'm driving to Dallas tonight to help Russ, Caroline and Stephanie move to a new house in the morning. The current plan is something on the order of buying a notebook, copying the first paragraph out, printing the outline, and taking both with me. I know we're not supposed to be rewriting ourselves at this stage of the game, but I'm going to be in a foul mood if I try to do the entire prologue in a bad voice. I know the goal here is speed, not perfection, but once I get the voice down, I'll have it.

I'll try to update tomorrow from the Shareks' or from Paul's place, but don't bet on anything new till Monday.