Well, this is interesting

Seems I'm now working on two stories simultaneously.

I guess it's not a horrible thing. I guess maybe this means I'll be spending the next two months working on both stories? Unless I go way overboard on the productivity front, and wind up finishing both this month. This certainly isn't something I'm planning on doing, but if it does happen, uhm, no time off for good behavior, I'll just have to keep plugging away at a new story next month.

It's also probably appropriate. Though also potentially dangerous. Since these stories, this year's worth of stories, are supposed to all be neatly stand-alone and yet still intertwined--connected in ways the reader shouldn't realize is likely to happen until the entire collection has been read, or at least until after the specifically connected stories have been read--it could be specifically productive and illuminating in this case to write the stories at the same time, so that they could literally be commenting simultaneously on each other and themselves, rather than my feared feeling that the stories kind of pile up on each other as you go through them. This story gives you something then the next gives you what the last story didn't and does it more honestly. And so on. Rather than that maybe the two stories are more subtly and directly connected than that. Or. Or something. I'll quit while I'm ahead, here, and get back to the story. Stories. Whatever.

Also, it's not a, not a story ring, though, I'm seeing concerns and ideas and, dare I say with a slightly bad taste in my mouth, themes, that kind of loop through everything, maybe bringing more of a unity to the theoretical collection than I might otherwise directly intend. Or, or, or something, I was quitting while I was ahead, wasn't I?

In other news I'm some five-eighths through A Changed Man by Francine Prose and I've got lots of things to say about it most of which I probably won't because by the time I'm done with the book I think I'll mostly be happy to be done with it and on to one of the other books that are starting to pile up on my newly-clean library card's head. Suffice it to say: I'm not entirely convinced I like the book, though I'm not completely certain where that is a) my fault b) the book's fault or c) the critics' fault.

"Interconfuselled" seems to be the word of the day here at TDAOC World Headquarters.