I’m one tiny little paragraph away from completing a draft of my paper which, well, I can’t quite call it the first draft. It’s more like draft v2.1. I wrote most of it once before, realized it sucked in structure and voice, restarted with a totally different voice but a similar (though subtly reworked) structure, and then filled in soe of the holes I’d left gaping in the first draft. I’ve edited so much of it already, though, that I anticipate only a half-day next week for editing, which means, once I finish this final paragraph, I’m free, free, free!
Well, sort of. I will have to do up a PowerPoint of some sort (maybe, if I want) and reformulate it as a talk before flying to St. Louis. But before I do that, I’m going to read a novel. For fun. For fun, I tell you.
(Don’t get me started on how badly I’m dying to write some new fiction. Dying, I tell you.)
In the meantime, a discard from among my witty footnotes. (Witty footnotes are a thing with me. I love writing them. Maybe they’re not as witty as I think, though.) Anyway, I quipped that maybe, with the stakes rising so high, SF today aspires not so much to evoke a “sense of wonder” as a “sense of WTF?”… I had Accelerando by Charles Stross, in mind, but a number of other books also rather nicely fit that description, I think.