I have a great social circle here in Houston and many supportive friends here and elsewhere. I’m making some deeper connections and even connecting with other creative types here. Mentally I’m in a much better place, but ironically the longer I go without writing regularly the more it affects my well being, creating a dangerous cycle.

But it’s one I think I am finally breaking. The other day I revised “Becoming,” which remains one of my favorite pieces of my own fiction, and submitted it to a possible market. Kiki Christie and I have also been very slowly returning to work on Honeycutt Tales, our erotic novel. I’m also working on a couple other ideas for erotic stories at the moment and have written a bit on one particular idea.

I’ve upgraded Wordpress to 2.9, the latest stable version, in the hopes that the improved interface will encourage me to blog more. I may broaden the scope of what I put here a bit and ramble more about whatever is on my mind (which is frequently sex or food). In the meantime, you can also keep up with me on twitter which I update frequently.

Finally, the paper which Reesa Brown and I wrote for Arse Elektronika 2008 has been available for some months now in Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep from Re/Search Publications. There are a bunch of great essays in it so check it out.

…learned to play 5 card draw and seven card stud poker.

…wrote about six pages of a new story about a character who has been lurking in my head for a long time now.

…talked with Kiki about making progress on Honeycutt Tales

…read Touched By Wonder: A Symphony of Fantastic Tales and was not impressed.

…have been reading Omaha: The Cat Dancer from Steve’s bookshelf. I encountered this when I was in my mid-teens and my reaction was ‘look, sex!’ But now I am impressed at the quality of the writing, too.

…got my computer back from Dell in working order, and discovered the hard drive is mountable again.

This weekend I am off to Orfunner, the local Burning Man event for those not attending Burning Man.

Slow progress is being made on Honeycutt Tales. My coauthor has been quite busy with her own life lately, but I’ve also had some good ideas about the story I’ve been working on and added a few new words. I wrote a great Heinlein-style rant in favor of sexual freedom that fits nicely into the story and can probably even be expanded in revisions.

I’m making progress on revising my short story “Funeral”. I feel inspired to keep working on it, and hope I can get it ready for another reader review and eventual submission later this month. I’ve also been working on revising some poetry, specifically a couple of my more sfinal pieces for submission to Aberrant Dreams (since they asked to see more).

Unfortunately, I’ve had to send my laptop, Mycroft, in for service at Dell and this promises to slow me down some, even though I can use Verra, the desktop machine. The setup is not as convenient and doesn’t allow flexibility of working location. I hope to keep writing even so, but I am going to be in a state of mild irritation until 5-8 business days pass and Dell sees fit to return Mycroft to me with the overheating/graphics issues repaired.

Still waiting to hear back on 11 pieces out with various publishers. Hope to make it 12 or 14 at least, this month.

Today I flaked on some writing goals. I had planned to get up a little early (for me, meaning early afternoon) to have a phone chat with Kiki and do some brainstorming for Honeycutt Tales. My fibromyalgia left me hurting through most of the daylight hours and so I spent them sleeping or whining about how much pain I was in. Brainstorming has been postponed and no writing got done either.

Even so, I can’t help but feel a little anxious because it has been a couple days since I put actual new words on the page. I’m getting that niggling little itch in the back of my brain that says, ‘better write!’ If I don’t, the itch gets worse and turns into full-blown irritation, irritation I’m liable to take out on my friends and loved ones, or myself. And anyway, I have (self-imposed) deadlines to make.

One issue is I didn’t redo the tickybox wall-chart we use to track our progress each week. Got to take care of that tonight. And then, some actual writing …

Or else who knows whose head I might bite off.

I got some good reminders to trust my process, that I need to relax and let my writing output grow naturally. A little later, when I got home, I made the decision I wrote about here. As soon as I did the inspiration hit and I wrote 3 pages of “Encounter at Hedonia.” Caspar isn’t even in this story, but it felt like renewing my trust in the process combined with a willingness to let my characters take up more psychic space helped open things up inside my head.

In the hopes this trend will continue, I’m letting it be known that my characters can take up as much brainpower as they like. If they were closed before, I’m throwing the doors to my brain wide open — come on in, guys, girls, and creatures in between. Do whatever you like — dig through the medicine cabinet, babble incessently in my ears, leave your dirty laundry lying around and empty milk cartons in my fridge.

Come into my brain and inspire me.

While I still respect de Lint’s talents, I read a good deal less of his work these days and, recently, the name ‘Jeck Crow’ has seemed increasingly alien to me. It feels especially so whenever some new virtual acquaintance asks me where the name comes from and I have to tell this story again.

After experimenting with the handle on Civ4 Online, I’ve decided to adopt the persona of one of the main characters of the Honeycutt Tales. You can now reach me on AIM and Yahoo! Instant Messengers as CasparLocke. Caspar is the handsome, ethically challenged commanding officer of Caprice, the starship where most of the action in the novel takes place.

It’s not that my own personality is so much like his, but more a way of acknowledging how much of a voice these characters have in my head, of honoring how much of my psychic space they take up. Knee-deep in this novel, I spend much more time inside Caspar’s brain than I ever did inside of Jeck’s.

Since I use Pidgin anyway, I will be leaving my old identities logged in and still accepting IMs to either name but I encourage my friends to message me as CasparLocke (on Yahoo & AIM) instead.

Honeycutt Tales: “The Struggle with Stimmies
Microsoft Word wordcount: 25,104 words
Manuscript wordcount: 35,000 words (lots of dialogue :)

Finally, this is finished. It was a difficult process — Kiki and I have actually started working on other parts of the novel before finishing this, but for some reason (neither a logical or a very productive one) having this unfinished was really blocking me in my process. I’m not sure why this episode was so hard to finish, perhaps because it was the middle of the book without us realizing it — and we developed some major plot developments in here — combined with the distraction of both co-authors by their respective lives.

My eager first readers will probably have to wait to see this chapter — I don’t know that it is ready to be shared in its current state, and we’re not planning to revise again until we have the entire book to stitch together. Our current (ambitious?) goal is to complete the remaining episodes by March or by my birthday in April, failing that.

Been doing a ton of work on writing lately — organizing my writing, setting my goals, making the house a more conducive space for writing (for ourselves and also the Gentleman’s imminent arrival). For whatever reason things clicked into place tonight while I was hanging out at Poking You. It took a few hours but the story is done and I get a gold star (no really, it’s one of the ways we’re motivating ourselves here at Slutbarn…)

I have a few short stories in the works, at various stages of writing. I hope to revise “Funeral” soon, and also have been doggedly trying to add sentences to another chapter in the Honeycutt Tales, “Encounter at Hedonia.”

Currently I have 10 works circulating at publishers, including 3 short stories (“Borrowed Time”, “Becoming” and “The Book”).