Ancient Logic

August has never been my favorite month. While I don't expect many tears to be shed for me as a poor teacher trudging back to school after two months of vacation, resuming my professional duties does represent an adjustment. Suddenly I don't have the time I had to exhaustively research and write my stories, I've got squeeze in an hour or two in the evening. I have resumed my double existence as a literary fugitive. While I wasn't able to finish all of my projects, two months of basically uninterrupted writing bore a lot of fruit. To shift my writing into a lower gear (even by a step or two) hurts . I was able to get drafts done for five stories and get two to a state fit for submission. One thing I tried this time around was not bogging myself down on one story. I wrote a draft for one story and then put it aside in favor of another. Eventually I got back to the previous versions and slowly worked up each, improving it each time.  I tend to obsess over my stories...

I got big news earlier this week when the winner's for the Dark Hall Press Ghost Story Contest were announced . My story "Again and Again" is going to be published as part of the anthology. The story is about the struggles of an agent in a covert occult organization trying to balance of demands of work and family when family is the one thing members of this organization aren't allowed to have. I'm honestly still trying to wrap my head around the notion of one of my stories being published. I don't have all the details yet, but as things develop I'll put up more details. What I do know is that I feel very lucky. Dark Hall Press has been turning out quality novels and short stories for a few years and it makes me very proud that the editorial staff would want to take a chance on a new, very green author. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to find something to drink in celebration!

LOST is a show for, by, and about cons. I don't think I'm the first person to point this out, but the series really operates on a very simple premise, how long are you willing to watch something on the basis of faith alone? It might say a lot about you depending on how long you watched the show when it was first on. A skeptical person watched the first couple of teasers way back in 2004 decided the show was a bunch of hokum and left it at that. At the other end of the scale, you have the completely credulous person, addicted to the show from the first episode, watching every episode religiously, pouring over the theories and web discussions, never losing faith that the show was finally going to be about something . Characters in the show are generally either perpetrators of cons or victims of cons. John Locke is taken in by his parents' insistence that he is special, eventually losing his kidney to his grifter dad. James Ford (Sawyer) becomes a con-man after that same guy...