Just finished penning the first draft (i.e., the hard, handwritten copy) of a new short story. I don't think it's all that great, but hell, it's done, and it's the first handwritten story I've finished in a while, so hopefully it'll be the start of me finishing even more in the weeks to come. I'm always having ideas for new stories -- so many that I don't even remember most of them, being left with only that feeling that I've forgotten something great and cursing myself for not writing it down, but even without these I've still got way more story ideas than I have time to actually write -- so the hardest part will be figuring out which story I should work on next. And I've got a bunch of older, unfinished stories too... so much to do.

Also, I've decided that I want to write an illustrated story-and-poetry book in the vein of Shel Silverstein's books and Tim Burton's recent work, so I need to get started on that, too. I recently purchased Burton's The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories (which totally wasn't worth $20, given that it's easily finished in a single short sitting), and while the drawings were cool and a few of the stories/rhymes were pretty clever, the whole time I read I found myself thinking that I could come up with something much stranger and more interesting, if not better on all fronts. And I've already got a handful of characters and rhymes that could definitely go for the book, so I'm anxious to get to work on that. I'm not exactly sure how I want to do the illustrations yet -- do I want to draw them in crayon? ink them and color them in pencil? or scan them in and color them on the computer? -- but we'll see. Any suggestions? Maybe in the coming weeks I'll try a few different methods and post them here so you can give your opinions. 🙂

Oh, and speaking of stories, I'm thinking one of my short story rejections should be here any day now, as we're rapidly approaching the six week mark. But maybe it'll take longer. I dunno. We'll see.

Anyway, gonna watch something -- not sure what, but I'm thinking it might be nice to close with a Buffy episode -- and then hit the sack. Might wake up and get the latest SC article up before I leave for work in the afternoon; might not get it up until tomorrow night, but at any rate it'll be up for Sunday. So stay tuned.

Ja!