Buried Under The Weather

Friend and artist Matt Hanneman has his excellent Effingham strip up on the web for your viewing pleasure, so check it out.

The last week or more I have had the worst case of flu in a very long time. I passed out twice (and fell down) from dizzy spells that hit me out of the blue like a linebacker. I sweated away a few pounds in night sweats. I had seriously deranged delierious dreams that invloved at one point the aforementioned Matt and his wife Lisa's apartment, but not their apartment, overrun by some sort of jungle growth that wasn't jungle growth. Neither seemed too worried about the foilage.

Ben had some good posts on his blog about Regina Spektor (he bought the CD!) and the subject of the ubiquitous/tired/cliched trilogy format that you find so common in sci-fi/fantasy publishing. It's not even trilogies much any more - the cycles tend to be longer nowadays, or just run open-ended. Sugu has been trying to lobby me off the trilogy format for a long time, not so much because of the kitsch (is it kitsch? Trilogies aren't confined to the genres, they're everywhere, even on Broadway with Tom Stoppard's new Utopia series) but because he thinks three books is too limiting a scope for what I've going on. My problem is I really love the three act structure. I spent a lot of time honing it just right, and I'm reluctant to break it up. I love the economy of three books, and I would like to leave people wanting more. But unless I get feeling better soon, there's not going to be any third book much less fourth or fifth.

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