So I’ve passed 30,000 words on the novel.  I’m probably more than a third of the way done with this draft, as I don’t think I will end up reaching 100,000 by the time I finish the plot.  (In fact, I have some concerns that the novel will be too short, failing to reach 80,000.  But I’ve decided I can fill things out later if I need to.)

Here’s a bit from today’s writing:

With a grip on my collar, the guard directed me out the back of the house into an alleyway. An old black Mercedes was parked there, quite similar to the one in which I’d spent the previous night.

He unlocked the trunk. "Get in," he said.

I got in. He slammed the trunk shut and left me alone in the darkness.

I heaved a sigh of relief.

Since it’s my friend Jay Lake‘s birthday, it’s about time I got around to blogging about how much I enjoyed his book Mainspring.

After Newton’s discoveries about the laws of the universe, many thinkers during the Enlightenment saw God as a "Divine Clockmaker" — a creator of the universe who then left it alone to run according to the laws he had set up, rather than intervening in the affairs of humankind.  This was the philosophy of Deism.

In Mainspring, Jay Lake has taken the clockmaker analogy and made it literal: the Earth has a huge gear running along the equator, and moves along a giant track in its orbit around the sun.  Thus, it is obvious that the world is a manufactured object, but the philosophical divide still remains between those who believe that the Divine Clockmaker merely created the world and left it to run on its own and those who believe that God still intervenes.

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I’ve crossed the 25K mark on Unforgettable.

Israeli science fiction magazine Mercury is interested in translating and reprinting my story "Tabloid Reporter to the Stars," which originally appeared tin Intergalactic Medicine Show.  You can read it for free in the original English here.

I’ve mentioned before that the story will be included in the IGMS anthology coming out from Tor Books in August.  Well, there’s already a review of the anthology at Ain’t It Cool News, including the following:

"Tabloid Reporter to the Stars" is pure Robert Sheckley and a perfect example of how to pull off an absurd twist ending and make it work.

Since I can remember reading some very good Robert Sheckley stories, that’s a high compliment.  And I’ve been reading stuff on Ain’t It Cool News for years, so it is, in fact, cool to see something I wrote mentioned there.

"Tabloid" was also selected as one of the Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2007.

The cover art for the Blood Lite anthology, which will contain my story "P.R. Problems," is out:

The book will be available in October, just in time for Halloween.