I’ve spent the week in Chicago, where my mom lives. We celebrated a nice thanksgiving yesterday, which I wrote about a little on Words Words Words. We’ve also been shopping for spices and specialty cooking oils. Tonight we’re attending Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.  I’m also looking forward to meeting with several collaborators from Continuous Labs on Saturday. With Amul, I’ll be attending Repo: The Genetic Opera Saturday night. Chicago is fun, but cold.

The last few days have been ones of intense immersion in the ongoing creative project. I’ve been working on it in one form or another almost continuously, whether it’s working with artists, recruiting webtalent, or developing websites. We’ve had some exciting developments recently: although I think few of our readers have noticed, we just launched our first significant story arc; one of our artists gave me an early draft tonight of their depiction of one of the world’s major features; and it looks like I might not have to build the project’s entire web presence on my own, after all.

There’s a lot of other stuff on my mind, not all of it happy, but I’m glad to be creating, to have housemates to create with, and to have a working hot tub to soak in.

Theo Drumsthemoon has recruited my friend Mr. Fang’s band, Inversion Effect, to appear on Halloween at Lufton Runner. Voluptuary Amul Kumar did a great job on the concert poster. I wish I could make it, but I don’t see how I could get to Port Outreach before tickets run out. I’ll be looking forward to the Internet coverage of the show, however, and to talking to Fang at the next Burn event about his recent travel experiences.

In fact, it looks like we’re without plans for Halloween. Is there anything cool happening closer to home — i.e. in Bryan/College Station, Austin, or possibly Houston that we might like to attend? If it’s the kind of thing you aren’t publically advertising, feel free to email me as well: vulpine at pobox dot com.

It’s been a long, tiring day. I’m filling in at the shop still because we have a critical shortage of trained front workers at the moment, and I’m the best option to fill in. I enjoy helping Reesa out, and it is actually a pretty fun place to work but I have so much I need to do that hasn’t gotten done yet. Not only that, but the whole family, myself included, is fighting off some kind of convention/travel crud which Reesa & Steve brought back from their trip and kindly shared with me.

We have a new way of interacting with Continuous Coast which we want to make live in the next day or so — we’d hoped to launch today but I haven’t even begun to implement it because of working at the shop. In any case, I’ll make progress tonight and you should look for clues to pop up soon.