My allergies have not been this bad for years. It’s not just me, either. My younger daughter, my manager, a third the people at work … everyone coughing, sneezing, hacking, etc. It’s like nature is engaged in a full frontal assault on the human sinuses. What’s the deal?

Because I’ve changed my address, I’ve been rewriting a lot of my older, unpublished stories. I wonder if that happens to all writers? Since I bring the manuscripts up to change the address on them, I end up going over them. And since I haven’t seen a lot of them for a while, I’m able to look very objectively and think … my God, did I really send this story out to editors like this? Cringe.

I also did a complete rewrite of my “End Of The World / Beggining Of A Novel” short story, thanks to comments from my writers group. I toned down the sex, cranked up the longing for normalcy, whomped a lot of passive phrases, but ended up keeping the tone distant from the protagonist. I felt it fit that way, because the character is a girl created and rasied by machines, and so she is a bit machine-like herself, despite her longings to be otherwise. All it needs now is a final read-through out loud to check for flow, then it’s off into circulation.

Next on my list is a long-overdue rewrite of my “Bikers in Space” story (which is another chapter of the above mentioned novel). I’ve had that in my todo pile for three years.