Further Adventures

It’s been a week since I wrote my CYOA story, and to remind me, the universe led me to this Amazing Super Powers comic.

I’ve undertaken no new adventures this week, except for these:

1) The adventure of reading Barry Hannah’s collection Bats out of Hell, prompted by the Believer interview conducted by Wells Tower. I am only a few stories in but I will say, It’s pretty good. Hannah’s characters all buzz on several levels at once—angry, desperate, wise, foolish—and even when outlandish they come across as true.

2) The adventure of finishing the first draft of a light-SF novel. Not much to say about this except, hooray! I flirted with the idea for a while and then stepped away and came back and I’m in love with this thing.

3) The adventure of buying plane tickets and of wondering what to read on the flight. There’s a particular type of book well suited to flights, at least for me: longish things, darkish things, maybe things I would not enjoy were I not in the sky. I used to panic at the thought of ascending—the night before AWP 07 I rolled in bed imagining the flight to NYC, kind of hoping for ice, snow—and now I’m completely over it and drink coffee instead of gin in my plastic-y little chair but there remains a magical desperation to the act of getting on, sitting down, listening to the engines, feeling the tilt. So: any suggestions for books to bring?

Bonus Part: The NY Observer ran a story on traditional-media writers getting involved in video game development. The comments tend toward the furious.