The Middle of the Dark

Follow this to hear Kat read an excerpt from her new and groovy new novel The Secret History of Moscow . I'm up to 67 pages in the novel, and was thunderstruck yesterday by an idea for a short story. I sat down and wrote most of it in one sitting, and then realized on my walk downtown, hey, this could be a really cool novel, too. Hard to make work, but really cool.

Actually 57! That's how far I am into the new novel. And I'm excited because I haven't written a new novel in oh, two years. It feels like going out on that first date with someone new, after you've been out of the game a while, and it's good. It works. You click. This book is clicking for me right now. There's a lot I'm still sorting out, but that's normal (it's been so long since I wrote something this involved that I have to remind myself, it's normal). I remember now the thrush and the thrall of a first draft. The blind confidence (I can do whatever!). I've spent so much time writing and rewriting the Big Damn Epic, I got lost in the woods. I focused on short stories for long time, and then found out what I already knew, which is that I'm a novel writer, not a short story writer so much. But here we are. Back on the road.

"Keeping Up Disappearances" , a story of mine which appeared in Issue 19 of Storyglossia back in April, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize . My thanks to Steven McDermott for taking a chance on the story and all his support not just for me, but for the other nominees as well. Support your writers!

Beach erosion in Wales turned up this incredible find, a WWII era P-38 fighter that ran out of gas and ditched on the beach 65 years ago. Rocky planets are forming in the Pleiades . Oh, and support your writers:

The Japanese recently sent a space probe to the moon, and slapped a HD camera on it, which has snapped some spectacular pictures of the moon and the earth as well. This is a link to a mini-movie of the probe's very low pass over the lunar surface; it's extraordinary to watch how much the surface changes in this little segment, considering how bland and uniform you might think the moon looks from here.

Go buy my dear friend and unbreakable pillar of support Kat's shiny new novel The Secret History of Moscow right now on Amazon! Also dig her thoughts on the origins of the book here .

Because my friend Mike's wife Becca told me to or else. The main reason I'm not posting regular is because work leaves me super tired and I'm coming home and working on a new novel. It's slow - slower than I'm used to, which I think is as much fatigue as I've become a very picky writer - but I'm very excited about it. Hopefully I'll have more to say about it in the near future. And hopefully I'll be blogging more regular and not such a wuss. Beyond that what has me excited is that a solar system very similar to ours has been discovered around 55 Cancri, a sun-like star about 44 light-years away. It has five planets, the most yet discovered around a distant star, and one of them, albeit a gas giant, lies in the habitable zone Earth occupies around the Sun. The sweet thing about the giant is it no doubt is host to several moons like Jupiter and Saturn, some of which would, if rocky, be elegible for Earth-like goodness. And there's plenty of E