Looking backward:

• ASZAS. Props to Jay, Deb, Lara, Greg, and all our authors. This one’s for you.
• Also: “The Ideas”, Flytrap #2; “Five Irrational Histories”, Rabid Transit #3; “The Third Party”, Asimov’s #whatever (September). All the stories I wrote in 2003, I sold, so I can’t complain.
• Wrote four more stories. Two, “Finisterra” and “Planet of the Amazon Women” I put serious work into. (The first is looking for a home and the second is in queue for a rewrite request.) The others, “Non Servimus” and “Marlow Ashore”, being written more haphazardly, under duress. Undoubtedly something will be done about them sooner or later.
• After 3100 miles of road trip, I really have to hand it to the designers and builders of the interstate highway system. Also to the fine engineers at Toyota, and at Sumitomo Rubber Industries. The guys who made my tire chains, though, not so much.
• Namecheck: Steven Clark. Orgcheck: The Wig Lodge of the Immersion Composition Society. How does this make me feel? Note the words in high volume. It makes me feel like a decadent dilettante.
• Forty-four hours is far too short a time to spend among such excellent and admirable . . . you get the idea. I’m glad I saw those of you I saw and sorry I missed those I missed.
• I don’t think I have anything new to say about the Boxing Day tsunami, but you could do worse than start with Ben Rosenbaum’s collection of charity data.

Looking forward:

• The day job’s better than it’s ever been. Now all I need is a waterfront office, a personal assistant, a pony and some ice cream, and my day-job life would be complete.
• Twenty Epics. I can feel it in my bones: this is going to be fun. But only y’all can make it as good as it deserves to be, so get scribblin’. (Or composin’. Or storyboardin’. Or whatever.)
• Irrational Histories. Through a chain of events too dull to relate, I’ve ended up with a Blogspot Blog. Not wishing to detract from the glory of the august publication you have on your screen before you, I have no intention of actually blogging on it. Instead, I’ll be publishing weekly abstracts of things that couldn’t possibly have happened, starting with the five from Rabid Transit. Who knows, maybe after I’ve accumulated a couple of hundred of the things someone will offer me a book contract and I’ll become the Alan Lightman of the humanities set. Comments welcome.
• This is not to say I’m not going to be working on Intervention, the novel that follows on from and perhaps incorporates “The Third Party”.
• Though it may be some effort not to work on the other novel, set in the rather stranger universe of “Finisterra” and “Planet of the Amazon Women”. No title yet, but a first line: In Utopia the finest views are reserved for the dead. (Has someone used that already? Let me know.)

Excelsior!