1/2/03 8:30 PM PST: Break on through to the other side.

God help us, we've made it all the way into 2003. Somehow the human race has managed to drag its dripping, sagging, embarrasingly underdeveloped psyche further into the future than it could reliably even foresee. Great.

In my fever period, I began to get mad visions of an overarching metatextual story that would encompass several of the quaint and entertaining things I'm writing now. Something big. Lucas big. Tolkien big. Really freaking big.

Of course, when these epiphanies began to develop, I had a fever of over 101 degrees and it was three o'clock in the morning. I was sure it was either something I would remember or too crazy to deal with, and went to sleep. I woke up and the ideas persisted, so I started jotting 'em down.

The next night, again sleep eluded me, so I got up and typed until 7AM. That was ... Sunday night. It was after the color purple turning sentient and before John Madden took up ballet dancing. Right.

Now, one text document with some notes is a long way from a masterwork, but I feel really strongly about it. The Crown slid in without even breaking a sweat. The new project I'm working on with The Lost Tribe's Allen Gladfelter began to form a philosophical and scientific backbone for the meta story, and a throughline character. Other stories dived in. Crazy talk.

I'm still cobbling at it -- I wanna really flesh out the end, so I can have something to point all the stories at and kind of give some fun foreshadowings. So being sick served one purpose, aside from irritating me endlessly.

Of course, the chapbook Born Beneath An Angry Star is now ... two days late and unstarted, as well as having to get my entire digital portfolio into a printed format for those people at the Times, hopefully stuck in the 20th Century as they are. Hell, now I think about it, I forgot to beta test my CD-ROM portfolio. Soon. While I'm down there next week, I'm gonna drop off a resume at a smaller paper across the street. No permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent interests.

The karaoke album may morph into more, now I practically have a home studio set up with the new karaoke machine. Spoken word. Songs. Guests appearances. To quote my dearly missed friend from MUDs, Slog da Grate Ogryn Champyun, "da possibilities be endless."

Angry but optimistic, I noted of myself, lying in bed this morning. I have such low expectations of everyone in the world, it's almost impossible for them to disappoint me anymore. Finding a balance. Mm.

So, revised plans include chapbook and a proposal to Image Comics this month, two pitches to majors and the album in February, and three more pitches to majors in March, as well as settling USC's hash then. Not going out of my way to publicize the Smackdown Awards because that would imply caring, when it should be clear that I do not.

Moving forward. Not apologizing for doing wrong purposefully.

Ruling the world.

Consider yourselves warned.