Whee! I'm writing again! Worked on Green for several hours, tracking comments from casacorona. Some very good feedback, though it looks like I'll have to kill my favorite scene in the whole book. It's part of a sequence which I may pull out and market separately as a piece of short fiction. As loving parents, like wretched old Tantalus we writers must slay our darlings.

Another good sign is the fact that books are bubbling in my head. As some of you may recall, I have talked in the past about book soup and novel bubbles. They're rumbling in my writer's mind now. Too many of them, in fact, which is a better problem to have than not enough, I suppose.

To be specific:

• Black Tulip — Historical fantasy/thriller set in 17th century Netherlands


• [Green 2] — Sequel to Green, as of yet untitled


• Original Destiny, Manifest Sin — A very alternate history of the settling of the American West


• Reign of Flowers — A sequel to Trial of Flowers and Madness of Flowers


• Tock, Gallant — Far future SF where the enslaved remnants of the human race are mentored by an immortal, animatronic Captain Hook, who is faced with the rebirth of Pan


• Tourbillion — The third, unifying book in the arc of Mainspring and Escapement


• A Tourist in the Land of the Slow (with lasirenadolce) — Narrative nonfiction about the history and current understanding of cancer, built around my experiences with the disease

And for some reason in the last few days I've been seized with a desire to plot out a multiple volume far future political space opera. Ghu knows what Fred is thinking. Oh well, I've got years ahead of me. I believe that when I'm done revising Green, I'll spend some time writing outlines, see if I can't get it out of my system.

I'm back, and damn I'm happy about it. Can you tell I've kicked the opiates?