It’s been a rough couple of weeks and I keep trying to say something but everything feels either trivial or boring or just “wrong.” When I don’t feel up to introspection or addressing serious topics, I fall back on my old LiveJournal crutch: Making lists! The majority of them are exactly the sort I would have posted on LJ a decade ago, which is to say, I can’t imagine anyone finding them compelling. For example, while I might be interested in trying to remember every concert I’ve attended, I suspect this might make for less than gripping reading material for anyone else.
That’s a long way of saying that I have two weeks worth of drafts which are unlikely to ever see the light of day. You can thank me later.
On an unrelated note, I recently read Frederik Pohl’s short story collection Pohlstars. I’d forgotten just how much I enjoyed his voice. I’ve read and re-read his Heechee books several times, but I’d never read anything else he’d written until this. The thing I love about science fiction short stories is that they give the author an opportunity to take a single, usually weird, idea, and let it play out for as long as it’s interesting. Larry Niven’s at his best when he’s writing short stories. I suspect Warren Ellis would be brilliant at this, or maybe he already is. Global Frequency and Secret Avengers were nothing if not short stories based on strange ideas.
Bah. It’s taken me two hours to write just this bit tonight. My tongue remains pretty knotted. It’s late. Let’s just hit the “publish” button and call it a night.