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New Project Update, Recent Diversions, and Chess

In reverse order. I am now accepting challenges over at chess.com, which offers a free correspondence chess service for anyone who cares to sign up and trounce me mercilessly. I am not a good player, and I am not a fast player, but I am, ahem, a player, if you will, and those looking to boost their ranking would do well to come by and annihilate me. I've only recently started playing again after a long absence and was no great shakes to begin with, so get in while the skin's soft...

Really loved the newish Coen Brothers flick A Serious Man, which is easily their most self-indulgent work to date yet has the chops to back it up. Equal parts hilarious and devastating--well, maybe a little more of the latter, actually--closest to Barton Fink, I suppose, but not really anything like it. Trying to finish up Peter Straub's A Dark Matter and then hopefully banging through Gemma Files's Book of Tongues before plunging into full-on research mode--I have thirty or so books out from the university library, and when I really get going I tend to abandon fiction almost all together until the trick is pulled. The price of the slow reader.

In terms of my new novel (the one after The Enterprise of Death) that said research tomes are for, the beast is officially in production, with the first 13K in decent shape and a research trip to the Netherlands looming, if all goes well. After flirting for some time with making it less fantastical than my previous two novels I had some of that fabled up-all-night-thinking-and-then-three-am-inspiration business they talk about, and it look like it'll be pretty goddamn crazy after all, which has me all sorts of excited--I do like the crazy. Still too early to say much else but if I can pull it off it'll be the best one yet--I just have to pull it off.

And you? What news from the Mark?

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