Stephen King has an essay up at the New York Times: What Ails the Short Story.

It’s a damn good assessment, I think.

We went to the Riverfront Playhouse last night and saw Night of the Living Dead: The Musical. Yes, you read that right.

Good stuff. Campy fun times for all. We’ll be going back.

The Midwest Literary Festival kicks off next Friday in downtown Aurora, IL with an all-day writers workshop and a weekend of panels.

It’s not too late to sign up for the workshop, although most of the one-on-one sessions with agents are booked solid. I’m thinking of going to the workshop (schedule). There are panels on plotting strategies and suspense that look interesting. Nothing specific to SF/F but worthwhile nonetheless.

I’m home, safe and sound, and mostly recovered from the trip. The flight from Southern California to Chicago smooth and productive. I splurged a little and upgraded to first class (my first time riding up front). Overall, it was what I expected it to be. Squishier seats, more personalized attention, and better food. Warm chocolate chip cookies, you say? Yes please. For all of the security measures taken, I find it humorous that they still serve drinks in first class in a glass. I mean, I guess if you’re flying in style, you must be a sane, stable person, right?

I finished my last revisions to the first two scenes of “Wholesale Goods” during the flight. I think this story is wrapping up more or less the way I intended. Once this revision is done, I’m sending it off to the Writers of the Future contest and getting back to work on other stories. Two more to revise, lots more to create.

I think I’ve finally figured out what Jim Gunn meant when he talked about presenting a story dramatically. It’s one thing to hear the words and ‘get’ the concept, another thing entirely to understand it in a way as to put it into practice. I’ve internalized it, as I’m wont to do. The newest story I’ve been working on has, I think, really worked well in that regard. Now I need to keep putting it to practice until it’s as natural as breathing and send more stories out!

I caught a blurb on the news this morning about a new TSA program to help them identify people acting suspiciously while standing in the security line at the airport. Teams of screeners have been trained to look for signs of “stress, fear and deception”. From an article on the program:

The teams have referred more than 40,000 people for extra screening since January 2006. Of those passengers, nearly 300 were arrested on charges including carrying concealed weapons and drug trafficking. TSA officials will not say whether the screeners have helped nab potential terrorists, but they say terrorists and other lawbreakers exhibit the same behavioral clues.

A success rate of 0.75%! Great work, guys. Let’s roll that out across the nation, privacy and sanity be damned!

When asked what techniques were being used for this identification, according to the news report on tv, officials cited security concerns and refused to elaborate. In essence, “trust big brother, we’ll look out for you”.

I’ll be going to the airport in six hours. Let’s hope I don’t wrinkle my nose wrong, sweat, avoid eye contact, look at people, shuffle my feet, or worry if that pair of fingernail clippers in my pocket is on the prohibited items list.

Despite careful planning and the best of intentions, yesterday’s travels turned into a comedy of errors. Flav and I planned our flights so we’d arrive fairly close together. From there, we’d pick up the rental car reserved by work and make our way to the hotel.

I woke up at 5:30 and jumped in the shower. By the time I made it downstairs, I had three messages on my cell phone, all from American Airlines. My flight was canceled. They rebooked me on a new flight that left an hour later but had a layover in Dallas. The extra hour gave us time to stop for breakfast on the way to the airport.

At the airport, check-in goes smooth. I get to the gate with plenty of time. I sit and write. The plane at the gate, going to Boston, hasn’t moved. They announce maintenance is looking at the brakes. Then they announce the plane is grounded, and my flight is now changing gates. Run across the terminal to find new gate.

Flight to Dallas is smooth. I have five minutes to run across the terminal to find my connecting flight and get a seat assignment. The only food vendors nearby are Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. I pass.

The trip from Dallas to Orange County goes smooth. I break down and spend $5 on a “turkey wrap” in-flight.

All told, I added a new scene to “Wholesale Goods” and read about half of Nebula Awards Showcase 2007. Lots of good short stories in there.

In Orange County, Flav finds me and we head to pick up the rental car. We go to the pickup area and are sent back to the airport to the service desk to “check in”. Back in the airport, we find out that the person who made the reservation made it for a day earlier, so the reservation is automatically canceled. After a half-hour I finally wade through the red tape and have a car.

By the time we get to the hotel, it’s 5PM local time, 7PM for my body and with the exception of what passes for an airline snack, more than twelve hours since I had any food of substance. We checked in, freshened up and grabbed dinner.

We get back and plan to meet, to prepare for the meetings today. I’m checking my email, news, etc., when I find the news about Robert Jordan. That puts a damper on what’s left of my mood.

Here’s to a better day.

Another week of work is finally over. It feels like the last couple weeks have been hectic and stressful. Things are looking up, though. I’m flying to California on Sunday, for a few days of meetings and planning. We’re just about to start rolling out new products that will make my life much easier.

I’ve managed to do a bit of new writing through all of this, both pieces of Flash Fiction during the weekly challenge. It’s been fun experimenting with dark fiction/horror and exploring some background for a future story. I have one more piece of that story to write and then revise to be one complete short instead of three connected pieces of flash. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with that yet, but it’s been a very fun and useful exercise.

The deadline for the Writers of the Future contest is coming up at the end of the month. I’m going to make a batch of revisions to one of my stories and send it off to that. I wasn’t sure if that contest was worthwhile, but I’ve done a bit of research and spoken to a few people about it and it looks like the general consensus is that it is a good thing

I’ve been switching back and forth between new stories and revising old. At some point it’s time to either toss it in a drawer because I don’t know how else to fix it or send it out into the world and hope it sticks somewhere. I’ve got a pretty clear idea of what’s broken and how to fix it, so I’m going to make one more pass at the current drafts.

I occasionally join in the weekly Flash Fiction challenge with the good folks over at Absolute Write. Every Sunday, a prompt is given and you have ninety minutes to write something inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun exercise, and a good way to experiment with different styles/genres.

This particular piece is based on the prompt “root”. I did shop this around to a few magazines that took humor like this. I did collect three rejections, one being a “near miss”. Rather than shop this around, I decided to post it here.

Read now: Holy Nepotism