I haven’t been writing a lot lately. Part of it has to do with the fact that I haven’t felt that stimulated and don’t want to turn you off by drenching you with insipid musings. Add to that the fact that the topic(s) that I really would want to write about are more or less off-limits for a public-facing blog, and you have a recipe for few posts.

To that second point, I suppose that authors everywhere, when confronted with a touchy subject, would sharpen pencils and come up with a roman-a-clef in which your hero Anthony Stevens is transparently recast as Andrew Strosser, Darcy Devereaux becomes Denise Derbyshire, Charles Cross becomes Chase Clover, and so on. It would be a lurid, storm-tossed tale of high drama and low dudgeon, win me a spot on the bestseller lists, and fuel recrimination and counter-recrimination among the literati for the next ten years. Actually, that sounds sort of fun. Should I attempt it? I remember reading recently something to the effect that fiction has to be truer than real life, because it has to be believable. Sometimes real life is so unbelievable, it nears insanity. Or at least inanity.

So here’s the plan: I’ll browse around for a compelling short-story contest. Your hero, as well as you, dear reader, will provide grist for the mill, and I’ll come out a couple weeks later with a winner, a piece about life, death, love, hate, hope, and despair, so deftly written that it merits notice by editors at the New Yorker.

Stay tuned!