I have been playing around with an RSS news reader since yesterday morning. Quite interesting. I wanted it in order to get the news feed from KurzweilAI.net but there seems to be a compatibility problem between their feed and the reader. Oh well. I wish the World Future Society had a feed. But I do have Sci Fi Wire. And Boing Boing. And Wired - Culture. And Space.com .

Is it just me or is there something indefinably wrong about all this news junkie stuff? If it ain't news feeds it's blogs commenting on the newsfeeds, and other blogs commenting on those blogs. Maybe I ought not to complain, given where I'm writing at this very moment. But it brings to mind the image I had in my head the whole time I was writing Aquaria -- A planet-sized crystal ball, endlessly complicated facets within, mazes of refraction, but allowing nothing to escape. We keep convoluting inward, turning back on ourselves. Or so it seems to me. Why are we not turning all this energy outward into the universe?

Probably just more of my sociological paranoia.

Sometimes I wonder if we should have stopped with Vic 20's. Things seemed so much cleaner and more honest when you had to do it all with slide rules.

Well "Shepherds" is on its way to Analog. At the latest it should be there by Friday. I've about decided that stories will happen when they damned well please and to stop trying to be so damned organized. And to forget about word count. I've got plenty of ideas, but they're not crystalizing. Or maybe I just need to sit down here, lock the cats in the bathroom for a few hours, put my hands on the keyboard and see what falls out. The hell with the outlines, index cards, just sit down and write. I do that with my fanfic, I wrote most of Aquaria with nothing more than lists I made up on the spot, I had no outlines at all for MO. Hell, six years ago I wrote a 300,000 novel with no outlines at all. Just sit down and write. Most of it is subconscious anyway. Just sit and stare at the screen till blood starts dripping out of my eyes. Something will happen. My brain will save me.

Tomorrow I have registration at school. Joy. Not to mention attempting to test out of Intro to Microcomputers.

I've run out of words, so I'm off.