Bringing Stella Home – Page 9 – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Desert Stars is now published!

Desert Stars, my third novel (and second in the Gaia Nova series), is now available as an independently published ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. Within the next couple of weeks, it’ll be available through Kobo, iTunes, Diesel, Sony, and Xinxii as well.

It’s been a long journey, and I’m thrilled to finally see it come through. I started the first draft back in the fall of 2008, but had been working on ideas for the world since 2005, when I returned from my LDS church mission in California. Spending the summer of 2008 in Jordan was a major catalyst for my imagination, and I soon was bursting with ideas for a far-future story on a desert world.

I got stuck in the winter of 2009, however–right before taking Brandon Sanderson’s English 318 class. Since he encourages all of his students to work on something new, I decided to write a book in the same universe in order to work through some of the world-building things that were holding me up. That book became Bringing Stella Home, which was a thrill to write all of its own.

The strategy worked; by the time I’d finished that one, I had a much clearer idea where to go with Desert Stars, and an awesome ending that was nothing like anything I’d planned in the first draft. And so, after graduating in April 2010, I soldiered through and finished the rough draft that summer.

It still had a lot of problems, though. Fortunately, my first readers were extremely helpful both in pointing those out and in giving me fantastic ideas for other things I could do. In the second draft that winter, I completely scrapped a major subplot in the second half of the book and focused on perfecting the character arcs for the two main characters: Jalil and Mira.

Around this time, I made the paradigm shift from traditional to indie publishing. Other projects like Genesis Earth and Bringing Stella Home took my attention for a while, as I learned the basics of the new world and prepared those books for publication. However, I always kept coming back to Desert Stars: I knew I had a good story there, and I was just itching to bring it to its full potential.

In the fall of 2011, I finally had that opportunity. The last draft flew by in three weeks, and was one of the funnest writing experiences I’ve had since I started writing seriously in 2007. By the end, I knew it was ready. I sent it out to my editor, Josh Leavitt, and started to prepare it for publication.

In writing any book, there are always moments that stand out; experiences where things come together in an unexpected yet memorable way. One of those came to me in Jordan, while I was walking down Queen Rania street from the University of Jordan to Al-Dustour, and the phrase “Temple of a Thousand Suns” flashed into my mind and sparked the whole novel. Another of those moments happened while I was driving from Salt Lake to Provo, and Mira’s final words in the last chapter came to me; I literally could not stop screaming for two or three minutes.

I could share more, but if I did, I’d find it difficult to maintain the illusion that I’m not a loony psychopath. 🙂

In any case, it’s just awesome to see the story come to maturity and embark out into the world. I’m sure this isn’t the end of the journey, but it’s definitely entering a new and exciting phase. I sincerely believe that this is my best book yet, and I hope you find it as worthwhile to read as I have found it worthwhile to write. If you do, I would appreciate it greatly if you took the time to post a review, or share it with a friend. Every little bit helps, and I’m grateful for whatever support you can give!

In the next couple of days, I’m going to send out a newsletter with some freebies including desktop backgrounds of the cover art. If you’d like to get in on that, be sure to sign up for the email newsletter via the form on the sidebar; you’ll also receive notices for other giveaways, as well as new releases. It costs nothing and you can always unsubscribe, so there’s no pressure or obligation.

And that just about wraps it up. Now: on to the next book!

Desert Stars cover art is in!

I just got the final version of the cover art for Desert Stars, and it looks great! Here’s a preview:

Many thanks to Hideyoshi, who also did the art for Genesis Earth.

I’ll finish the cover and upload the ebook over the weekend. By Monday or Tuesday, it should be up for sale across all sites.

Squee! I’m so excited!

Climbing the 10k mountain

writingmetric — Many Bothans died to bring you this.

I recently read an amazing blog post by Rachel Aaron, in which she explains how she went from writing about 2k words per day (about what I’m doing) to routinely breaking 10k.

This is something I really want to do with my own writing. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, I need to pick up the pace if I’m going to keep up with my professional goals. If I could go from 2k to 10k, and make 10k the standard…holy cow, that’s a 500% jump in productivity. Who wouldn’t want that?

From Rachel’s blog:

Drastically increasing your words per day is actually pretty easy, all it takes is a shift in perspective and the ability to be honest with yourself (which is the hardest part). Because I’m a giant nerd, I ended up creating a metric, a triangle with three core requirements: Knowledge, Time, and Enthusiasm. Any one of these can noticeably boost your daily output, but all three together can turn you into a word machine. I never start writing these days unless I can hit all three.

The point that I probably need to work on the most is time: I tend to start off the day slow, checking Facebook and blogs and other stuff before getting into the writing, then write for a little while before running off and doing some chore or allowing myself to get distracted again. Sometimes, I don’t really buckle down until a couple of hours before I should go to bed, and that’s bad.

But really, I think the main obstacle is just thinking that writing is difficult. If everything comes together in the right way, there really isn’t any reason why 5k or 6k or even 10k should be too difficult–and yet we naturally think that if 2k is hard, anything more should be that much harder.

I’m in a weird state of limbo right now between moving and preparing to go overseas, but I’m going to start a daily writing log so that I can figure out what time of day is most productive. You can’t wait for life to settle down before you get to work; you have to roll with what you’re given. Also, I’m going to put a lot more effort into outlining and planning, so that I don’t get hung up by research when I should be writing. Even discovery writers need a little bit of time to ponder things before putting words to the page.

Also, after considerable thought and effort, I’ve decided to put Star Wanderers on the back burner again. I finished the novelette last week and submitted it to Writers of the Future; I think it’s quite good, and stands a good chance of finding a home in one of the short markets. But the full length novel, for various reasons, just isn’t coming to me. I don’t know if it’s because I lack the life experience to write it, or because I’m too close to it to see what’s broken, but regardless of the reason, I need the break.

I’m not sure whether to do Edenfall or Stars of Blood and Glory next, but I’m leaning towards Stars of Blood and Glory. This is a novel set in the Gaia Nova universe, with characters from Desert Stars, Bringing Stella Home, and Heart of the Nebula. I’ve been itching to write it since this summer, but never got around to it because other projects got in the way. Well, hopefully now that will change.

I know from emails and other correspondence that some of you are really looking forward to Edenfall, but don’t worry, I’ll get around to it soon. In order to do it justice, I feel I need to reread Genesis Earth and immerse myself in some Carl Sagan, but right now I’m still running on a sci fi adventure trip. If I can implement some of these metrics and push my daily word count upwards of 10k, it shouldn’t be long before Edenfall gets my attention again. My goal is to finish it before the end of the year, so there’s a very good chance it’ll be published sometime in late 2012.

As for Star Wanderers, I’ll shop the novelette around after I hear back from Writers of the Future. I think it has a good chance at winning the quarter, but of course I can’t count on it. At this point in my career, I should probably be playing both the traditional markets as well as the indie field.

That’s just about it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to write…

Am I swamped, or am I lazy?

This post might get a little emo, so I apologize in advance.

I feel like I have so much on my plate right now, and yet when I look back at what I’ve accomplished each day, I wonder if I couldn’t have been more productive. I’m moving out of my apartment on the 21st, so that’s the deadline for pretty much everything, and here’s what I’ve got to do before then:

Run through the copy edits for Desert Stars and rewrite the epilogue.
Get the cover art and publish Desert Stars.
Write the epilogue for Journey to Jordan and publish it.
Finish Star Wanderers and submit to Writers of the Future.
Do a guest post for Slava Heretz.
Finish the application for the TLG program.
Get rid of all my remaining books.
Figure out electronic W2 and other forms for taxes (before leaving in January).
Write up the “About My Books” page on blog.
Do a couple of recap posts on the travel blog.
Pack and ship my desktop computer.
Pack all my remaining stuff.
Get post office to forward all mail to home address.
Clean apartment for move-out inspection.
Find suitable traveler’s insurance.
Go clothes shopping.
Half a dozen other things that I’m sure I’ve forgotten.

In other words, this is not the time to be playing minecraft.

And yet, taken individually, most of these tasks are not all that difficult. A lot of them are just mindless chores associated with moving, and the other ones, while requiring hard work, are pretty straightforward. So am I really swamped, or am I just disorganized and lazy?

This is something I’ve struggled with since graduating last year. When I was in school, I was constantly busy, but I was also constantly producing. Even though my writing suffered a bit when I was swamped, I still found time to write three novels (Ashes of the Starry Sea, Genesis Earth, and Bringing Stella Home) and hold down a student job. For the last year, I haven’t had any school and most of the time I haven’t had a job, and yet my productivity doesn’t seem to have improved.

Part of it has to do with structuring time and organizing myself. In the past year, I’ve learned that a routine isn’t something you should hang onto doggedly, but something you need to constantly reinvent. And yet, when I’m staying up until 2am-3am and not getting up until 8am-9am, I can’t help but feel that something’s off. The whole moving limbo thing certainly doesn’t help, but hey, the work’s still got to be done.

Maybe it’s just deer in the headlights syndrome. I’ll try making a checklist of everything I want to accomplish in the next two weeks and go for it. In the meantime, I’m going to get out of this apartment and take a walk, because if I don’t, I’m going to go insane.

Also, as a token of gratitude for putting up with my babbling, here’s something cool I made the other day:

See you around!

Trope Tuesday: The Bechdel Test

The Bechdel Test is a way to measure how prominently women figure in a story. It mostly comes up in discussions of TV and film, but can also be applied to works of literature. To pass the test, the story must have

at least two named female characters
who talk to each other
about something other than men.

The surprising thing, as you can see in this discussion of the trope, is that so few stories actually pass this test. Even in literature, works like The Odyssey, Romeo & Juliet, and even War & Peace fail to pass or only barely pass this test.

Closely related to the Bechdel Test is the Smurfette Principle, where only one of the major characters is female–the token chick. Stories that fail to pass the first part of the test fall into this category.

So why does this happen? It may be because most writers are male, but that isn’t necessarily true of books and literature. Novel writing, after all, was originally considered a womanly pursuit, and the English major was created in the so that women could have something to study while they were in college. Not surprisingly, 19th century works by female writers like the Bronte sisters tend to pass…

…or do they? It’s been a while since I read Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice, but the impression I got was that the women in those books spend only really talk with each other about men. And when you look to contemporary writers like Dickens and Tolstoy, the trend holds. After all, how many female characters are there in A Christmas Carol? Do any of them ever even talk to each other?

This isn’t necessarily a measure of how good or bad a story is, or even of how feminist it is (Aliens, after all, technically passes), but it is a measure of how independent and well rounded the female characters really are. If the story doesn’t pass, it’s a sign that the women only play a role in relation to the men, or that the male characters are the ones who advance the plot.

I don’t usually like to bring up my own stories in relation to these tropes, but I thought it would be useful to apply this test to my own books and see how they shape up. As a writer, I think it’s a good idea to do this periodically, to make sure my work isn’t slipping into a rut. So here we go:

Genesis Earth

Point 1: Yes, there are two named female characters: Terra and Stella.

Points 2 & 3: No, they never talk. However, when you apply the reverse Bechdel test (two men who talk to each other about something other than women), Genesis Earth only barely passes. Michael talks with Tom in the first chapter, mostly about Terra, and for the rest of the book he and Terra are alone.

Bringing Stella Home

Point 1: Yes, it passes. Named female characters include: Stella McCoy, Danica Nova, Anya Sikorsky, Tamu, Lady Borta, Lady Zeline, Sergeant Maria.

Point 2: Yes; in most of Stella’s scenes, she’s talking with Tamu or Borta or one of the other Hameji women. Also, since Danica is the captain of the Tajji Flame and Anya is the chief pilot, they interact quite a bit.

Point 3: Yes, but just barely. In most of their scenes together, Stella and Tamu are talking about Qasar or the harem or sex. There are a couple where they talk about each other and their past, but it all relates back to their captivity under the Hameji. At one point later in the book, Anya goes AWOL and Danica has to talk her down, which is probably the scene that makes the book pass, but a hardcore feminist might argue that that conversation is indirectly about a man. Still, I’m counting it.

Desert Stars

Point 1: Yes, there are plenty of women. In fact, as you can see from this list of non-minor characters, there are almost as many women as there are men:

Female	Male
Mira	Jalil
Shira	Sathi
Zayne	Hamza
Tiera	Rumiya
Lena	Gregor
Surayya	Kariym
Amina	Ashraf
Rina	Ibrahim
Sarah	Lars
Michelle	Nash
	Mark
	Will

Point 2: Yes, plenty of these women talk to each other. Surayya and Amina are practically joined at the hip, Tiera, Shira, and Lena all have private conversations with Mira, and the only time Rina even talks is when she and Mira are alone.

Point 3: While most of the conversations between the female characters revolve around men and marriage, Tiera talks with Mira about honor, and Rina talks with Mira about leaving home. Without spoiling too much, there are other conversations that have nothing to do with men, though they happen off-stage and only get reported second-hand. Either way, I’d say this book passes.

None of this is to say that a good story must pass the Bechdel test. Lawrence of Arabia, for example, doesn’t have a single female actress–not one single actress!–and it’s an amazing film. As a counterpoint, I’m sure there are plenty of good stories out there (most of them probably anime or manga) that do not pass the reverse Bechdel test.

However, it is a good measure of female presence and how much the story is driven by men. And as a lens through which to view the wider culture, it offers a surprising and somewhat disturbing perspective on male-domination in fiction.

Heart of the Nebula 2.0 is finished!

That’s right: the second draft of Heart of the Nebula, direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, is now finished. Here are the stats:

words: 90,081
chapters: 20
ms pages: 426
start date: 7 Nov 2011
end date: 4 Dec 2011

And the word splash:

This was just a quick draft to fix some of the known problems before sending it off to my first readers. I’d thought that it was missing a whole bunch of stuff, but I ended up taking out more than I’d put in. Still, it feels like it’s missing something, and I’m not sure what. Hopefully, my readers will be able to help me figure it out.

I’m starting to notice a pattern with my writing. The first draft is always the hardest, fraught with all sorts of frustrations and setbacks. In contrast, the second draft is usually pretty quick, and involves fixing the problems without making any drastic changes. The third draft is where the story really comes to life, as I start to make connections and tap the latent possibilities. This may continue in the fourth draft, but anything after that is usually just a matter of polishing the prose.

For those of you who’ve read Bringing Stella Home, this novel takes place five years after and centers around James McCoy and Lars Stewart. Stella/Sholpan makes a brief appearance, but Danica and the Tajji mercenaries do not; I plan on writing more about them (a LOT more about them) in Stars of Blood and Glory.

I’m going to send this draft out to my first readers and let it settle for a couple of months. Once I’ve gotten their feedback, I’ll undertake a thorough revision, possibly with some drastic changes to the story. I don’t want to commit myself to a specific date, but if all goes well, I may publish it sometime next summer.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in beta reading Heart of the Nebula, shoot me an email–but please, only ask if we know each other IRL. My next big project is Star Wanderers, which should hopefully be finished by mid-January. And of course, there’s Desert Stars–I’m in the process of getting the cover art, so it shouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks before it’s up!

So much going on…it’s good to get something finished.

Picking up the pace

I’m writing this post from somewhere in Iowa, riding the California Zephyr from Chicago to Salt Lake City. Since I hate sleeping on the train, I figured now is as good a time as any to write a blog post.

One of the good things about traveling by train is that you have lots of time to just sit and think. Yesterday I took a long, hard look at my writing over the course of the last year, and was surprised at what I found. Long story short, I think it’s time for a major recalibration.

As you know, my main writing goal is to produce a minimum of two novels per year, fully polished and of publishable quality. Desert Stars will be my third this year, if I can get it up before January. But after that, I don’t have a whole lot lined up in the queue. Heart of the Nebula is a finished rough draft, but it’s the only one; everything else is either incomplete or just an idea floating around in my head.

Perhaps the best way to see it is to look at this chart. It lists all of the novels that I started, finished, and published by year. The titles highlighted in blue are novels that I’ve epublished. Ashes of the Starry Sea was a practice novel, so I’ve grayed it out, but everything else is a project I intend to carry to completion.

While 2011 was a great year for me in terms of starting new works, it was a downright horrible year in terms of actually finishing anything new. I’m worried that unless I can force myself to buckle down and produce new material at a much faster rate, this handicap is going to bite me in the butt next year.

Here’s another way to think about it: if I want to write two novels per year, and I can only focus on one novel at a time, I should be able to complete any project in no more than 26 weeks. And yet, when I look at my word count spreadsheet (which only goes back to May 2009), here’s what I see:

Genesis Earth: 22 to 26 weeks
Bringing Stella Home: 50 to 54 weeks
Desert Stars: 52 to 56 weeks
Heart of the Nebula: 18 weeks (unfinished)
Edenfall: 2 weeks (unfinished)
Star Wanderers: 9 weeks (unfinished)

What this tells me is that my current writing method is unsustainable. Either I need to learn how to juggle two projects at once, or I need to learn how to produce quality material in half the time–and in all reality, I should probably learn how to do both.

For those of you who might be worried that I’ll sacrifice quality for speed, let me assure you that I don’t intend for that to be the case. Dean Wesley Smith makes a very compelling argument on this subject, how speed and quality are not mutually exclusive. The more I write, the more practice I’ll get, which will hopefully improve the quality of my writing.

One thing I really ought to do is write something new every day. For most of 2011, I was revising something I’d originally written in 2008 or 2009, maybe throwing out a couple of scenes to start from scratch, but overall simply revising an older work. It’s made me a little rusty, and I can feel it. I can say right now, that needs to change.

My biggest concern is that once I’m overseas, it will be much harder to balance these writing goals with everything else going on. However, this isn’t 2008; I don’t have all the obligations of a student. As for whether the obligations of a teacher are any worse, we’ll have to see.

What I really want to do is write a novel in a week–preferably, in three days. Even if the first draft isn’t very good, just the act of doing it will break down some major barriers, I feel. If I finish Star Wanderers by mid-January, I’ll turn it around and write a novel with the same events from Noemi’s point of view, all in a weekend if possible.

In short, this is what I want to do:

Produce a minimum of 2 publishable novels per year.
Reduce the time for each draft to 6 weeks average.
Write a minimum of 500 new words each day.
Learn to juggle two projects when revising.

This isn’t going to be easy; I have the feeling that it’s going to involve a fundamental shift in the way I approach writing. However, if I can pull through it, I think this might just transform my career in the way that I need in order to take things to the next level.

In the meantime, I’d better get some sleep. I’ve got a long day of travel ahead tomorrow, and I’ll need all the energy I can get if I want to get some serious writing done.

Random updates before leaving

I’m spending Thanksgiving with my parents this year, which means I’m leaving for Massachusetts tomorrow…by train. Well, technically, Sunday morning, since the cross-country trains come through Salt Lake City in the wee hours, but to my way of thinking it’s tomorrow and not Sunday. Either way, I won’t be posting anything until Tuesday night, since that’s when I arrive.

You may have noticed that Amazon recently bumped the price of my two short stories, “Memoirs of a Snowflake“ and “Decision LZ1527,” back up to $.99. I decided to raise the price because giving them away for free wasn’t having any sort of effect on sales of my other novels. Sure, it exposed my work to more readers, but I want to be known for my science fiction series, not because of a couple of cute stories that aren’t a whole lot like anything else I’ve written.

However, after reading Kris Rusch’s recent post on this subject, I decided to drop the price of Sholpan to free for the next couple months. Sholpan is a novella taken from Bringing Stella Home, and is a great place to start for my Gaia Nova series. It’s a complete story on its own, but I’m hoping it will drive interest in the full length novel, and later in Desert Stars.

If the price dropping process is anything like it was for the short stories, though, it will be a while before Sholpan is free across all platforms. Amazon doesn’t allow you to set the price to free yourself; you have to get all the other places to do it first, so that Amazon’s bots will detect it and price match. To do that, you have to drop the price on Smashwords first and wait for it to trickle down.

In short, it will probably take three to five weeks for Amazon to make Sholpan free. Hopefully it’ll happen in time for the holiday season, and probably for a month or two afterward.

In the meantime, I just noticed that “Memoirs of a Snowflake“ is on both the science fiction anthology and fantasy anthology top 100 lists on Amazon. Woot! It’s not going as fast as it was when it was free (I think I’ve had just five sales in the past 48 hours), but it’s still going. It will be interesting to see how long it holds up; it would be awesome to crack the top 10 on either of those categories!

And that’s about it. I’ll leave you with the following quote:

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.

–Martin Buber

Struggling not to settle

I’m in the middle of my first revision pass through Heart of the Nebula, direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, and…I don’t know exactly how to put this, but the story seems to be simultaneously smoother and more shallow. Plot-wise, everything works great; character-wise, there just doesn’t seem to be as much depth as my other work.

I remember finishing the first draft in May, and being surprised at how well structured it was. Each of the three major plot points happened after exactly five chapters, and each of the chapters was almost perfectly balanced–a far cry from my previous work. I had a few stops and starts in the first part, but everything after the first hundred pages was smooth as gravy. What’s more, I’m finding in this revision that not a whole lot needs to change; it works pretty well as-is.

And yet…I can help but feel as if something is missing. The characters just aren’t coming alive the way they did in my previous works. The story isn’t quite as engaging, the climaxes quite as gut-wrenching as I would like. It feels like a good story, but not a great story.

Here’s the thing: my previous stories were all broken in this phase. Desert Stars was so broken I had to write another novel to figure out how to finish it–and even then, the second half of the book went entirely in the wrong direction and had to be thrown out. Bringing Stella Home had a solid storyline, but Stella’s character was completely broken and had to be rebuilt from the bottom up. And Genesis Earth had half a dozen false starts, and at least as many chapters that had to be thrown out because they did nothing to advance the plot.

But Heart of the Nebula isn’t exactly broken, it’s just…not at the level I would like. And I worry that because it isn’t broken, I won’t feel as compelled to make it better. I worked hard on the others, and learned a lot of lessons which helped me to write this book, but even if I’ve hit my stride and this is the result, it feels too much like settling. I can do better.

None of this probably makes any sense if you haven’t read the manuscript, but I hope it doesn’t sound too much like whining. Even if these are problems, these are good problems and I’m happy to have them. When I share this with my first readers, they will probably have all sorts of insights that will make me smack my forehead and make everything awesome again.

I guess my point is that I don’t want to settle, even though this draft will probably not be as good as I’d like it to be. I’ll fix all the known problems, then send it out to my first readers and trust them to help me find the unknown problems.

In the meantime, I should probably start something new. I have a ton of great ideas for the fantasy novel, and bouncing them off of friends has really helped me to figure out what else the story needs. After I finish reading American Gods, I’ll stock up on some fantasy to get into the right mindset, starting with David Gemmell (incidently, at dinner group tonight, I literally squeed while talking about David Gemmell. It was simultaneously embarrassing and really awesome).

Enough of this. Time for sleep.

Slogging along

So I’m working part time now, making ends meet as I get ready to finish up the year and go abroad for a while. This time, I’m only doing about 20-30 hours per week, so it’s much easier to balance writing with everything. Minecraft is still a distraction, but I think I’m finding a good balance.

Star Wanderers is coming along, but I made the mistake last week of reading some of the critical feedback on the first part while working on the second. Not that the feedback is bad–it’s quite good, actually, and very helpful–but taking criticism on a work in progress put me into a temporary slump. I think I’m most of the way out of it now, but progress is more sporadic than I’d want it to be.

However, I just started revising Into the Nebulous Deep today, and I’m very excited about that. Into the Nebulous Deep is a direct sequel to Bringing Stella Home, featuring James, Lars, and the Colony five years after the events of the first novel. I haven’t looked at it since May, but lately I’ve been thinking a lot about it, so I think it’s time to dust it off and work on it again.

It definitely needs a new title, though; “Into the Nebulous Deep” is much too convoluted. Anyone have any ideas? I’m thinking something like “Heart of the Nebula” or “Into the Deep,” but neither of those have quite the right zing.

Even though I finished the first draft almost six months ago, no one has read this one yet. It had some pretty big issues that I felt I needed to fix before sending it out to first readers, but I wanted to give it some time to settle before reworking it.

As if that’s not enough, I’m also working on getting Journey to Jordan up and published. This book is more of a travel journal, so I’m self-editing it, but it’ll probably take a couple weeks before it’s up and ready. I was going to publish it under a pseudonym, but now I think I’ll just keep it under my own name. I’m not sure whether I should change the names of people mentioned in the book; I never say anything libelous about anyone, but if that’s the standard MO for works of non-fiction, then maybe I ought to do it. In any case, my goal is to have it out over Thanksgiving break.

Other than that, not too much to report on. I’m bringing back my travel blog in anticipation of going abroad, but I haven’t said anything particularly interesting other than “I’m back!”

Oh, and I’m reading Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet and thoroughly enjoying it. I don’t generally like poetry, but Poe and Gibran–I could read them all day.