I've been just a little down lately. I took a full-time job last month, which is good for our bank account—particularly given that I haven't gotten much work in the past year—but I've been working insanely long hours, and the toll it takes on my writing time is distressing.

Still, I've managed to complete three short stories in the last couple of months, two of which are out now seeking their fortunes in the world, with the third to go out tomorrow, I hope. The three stories, though unrelated, together form what I'm thinking of as the World Trade Center Trilogy. The first, "The Two Towers," was written for an anthology of ghost stories Ellen Datlow invited me to submit to. That one may be unpublishable given political-correctness concernts, though, so the third story in the trilogy, "Timesink," was written as a safer backup ghost story.

The second story, "Sparkler," is a science-fiction story that attempts to cause the reader to identify with a terrorist on a suicide mission. That one's out at Asimov's now.

I'm trying to get another story underway, an SF tale tentatively called "The Fairest of Them All." After a couple of false starts, I think I'm about ready to start in on some serious writing. However, there's that 12-hours-at-least-a-day job thing that drastically slows down the work.

That wouldn't be so bad, but my agent is sort of waiting for me to make revisions to my novel Silvertide so she can send it out. I want to get started on that soon, but the short story is insisting on being written first, and it's hard for me to ignore a story that insisting like that.

Of course, she hasn't seemed to be doing much with Missionary Man lately, which is what you really want to hear about, and which has also been getting me down. I think the post-9/11 time when the material really was untouchable is long over, but how do I convince her of that, and get her to send out my massive manuscript that, darn it, costs so much to reproduce at Kinko's? How hard do I push? It a damn good book, and it's time to fucking sell it. Dammit.