This morning before breakfast I wrote the last thousand words or so of what I believe is the final draft of a novella called "Inclination." What a relief. This story, which I think might be my best but was just a bit off, has been hanging over my head for the better part of two years. This weekend I'll read it aloud to my wife, and if it gets the LSA (Laura's Stamp of Approval) it will go out in Monday's mail.

This story looms large for me. It's the, believe it or not, only piece of solo fiction I've written from scratch (and completed) in the past two years. I've sold and published a bunch of stories in that time, some to the best markets and notices of my career, but those were without exception older trunk stories that I held up to the light, looked at from a new angle, polished up, and sold. A couple of them were more than ten years old. After a run like that, a body starts to wonder if he's capable of coming up with any new that's worth reading.

I've known generally what I needed to do to this story for a few months, but I just hadn't been able to sit down and do it. When I finally did, it only took me a few hours overall, spread out over three or four days. Shoulda started sooner.

"Inclination" is set in the same future milieu as my earlier novelette "Dance of the Yellow-Breasted Luddites," and shares one character. And I'm happy to say that it's yearning to be a novel, which means there's still some lead in my pencil after all.