My friend Maura alerted me to the fact that my story “The Country of the Young” (in the current issue of Interzone, ie. issue 219) got a really positive review from Ziv Wities over at The Fix. I’m very happy to hear it, and more than ever I’m looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of the issue. For those of you in the UK, it should be in shops. For the rest of the world, I don’t know whether a Fictionwise edition is forthcoming (Interzone 218 doesn’t seem to have been posted at Fictionwise yet either), but if it does appear, I’ll post it here.

But my forthcoming works list only includes one piece, which is enough to get me back on track for submitting again. I have some poems and a few stories ready to send out now. (Currently in the “send” pile are “Realer,” “The Incident of the Imo Year,” and “Alone With Gandhari,” along with a few poems.)

As for my WIP, I backed off from “A Killing in Burma” (the yeast is set but the dough is rising slow) so it’s “Ten Spikes and a Hammer,” an alternate-WWII story involving, well, geomancy. It’s coming along. It’s been sitting, languishing at almost-finished for a long, long time, and finally I busted through and got to the end, so now I’m going to try pare off 20% of the text, partly as an exercise in paring/focusing/sharpening, and partly because it makes it much more saleable. I think I’m going to experiment a little bit too, with this impressionistic effect I’m going for in certain scenes. Experimentation: it’s dangerous, but also might be the most effective way to get across what’s happening certain scenes. Anyway, I’ll try it out and see, since I’ll have older drafts on hand if impressionism fails me. And then, out it goes!

But for today, I have some work-related editing to do, and a pile of midterm essays for which my marking duties are somewhat alarmingly overdue. Time to wander across campus with a flask of coffee and see how much a guy can get done in half a day of focused work.