Whew. Well, I had planned on 5000 words, but produced roughly 7000, with almost 5000 of them being produced, painstakingly, today, so those paying attention can see another red bar in my Projects section over in the sidebar.

Not without a great loss of time in all kinds of research. I know lots of stuff about pack ice, about thermohaline circulation, about underwater detonation of nuclear explosives, and shock propagation through water (and its effects on ice). Not enugh for everything to be really realistic, but then, I’m not sure anyone knows what would happen in a scenario like the one I sketch out in my story. “Ogallala” is probably my most insane, and one of my darkest, stories to date. I’m not sure it’s exactly what Cory and Holly are after for Tesseracts, but anyway, it’s below the cutoff length of 7000 words, and likely to go back down to 6500 after a good edit. Hell, maybe even 5000. Too bad 4000 words is impossible for this story, or I’d be able to send it to Clarkesworld.

Ah well. Ogallala will be going for crit next, since my superheroes story will be out of crit cycle in a couple of days, but I think it needs a good serious print-and-red-pen-attack before I send it to them. I imagine my classmates from Clarion might get sick of my productivity soon, and there is an infodump in the middle that needs a few amputations, but I am quite excited to have gotten a draft off.

So… next up, though I’m not exactly planning on diving straight into it, is a “A Killing In Burma”, a celebratory geekfest about a business startup in a fascist society undergoing collapse, to be followed by, I think, some revisions of Clarion stories, specifically “Comfort Woman” (about which I’m starting to feel I know enough to fill out that theme in the story well, without overloading it with too much significance), and “Lester Young and the Jupiter’s Moons’ Blues”, and maybe, if I get the time to really thoroughly research DRM and methods of overcoming it, “Winter Wheat”. (Which would leave only my first Clarion story, “Why Korean Eat Dog”, for revision. Except it’s actually going to get a rather thorough rewriting, starting at a point a long time after the end of the story as my classmates saw it.)