I've missed you, Dear Reader. And someday we can be together again, as soon as I finish my essay on Arthur Schnitzler's "Die Weissagung" ("The Prophecy"), which is due on Tuesday. I've got quite a bit to go, almost the whole thing, but even writing an essay in German is faster than writing fiction in English.

It's been a bad term for fiction. The Literati liked the first and only thing I showed them this term, the first section of a postapocalyptic story that I still think is spectacular in concept, but which for various reasons (I won't go into them here) I couldn't make any progress on beyond that first bit.

Well, I'll tell you one: it's really hard to work fake blog posts into a work of fiction in an interesting way. Unless you're reading them as they happen and they're explaining the action, I suppose, but that wasn't the case here.

I didn't have any ideas. There was nothing I wanted to say that I thought I was capable of saying (I have a tendency to bite off more than I can chew as is) so when one of the guys in our class used the phrase "a night and a half with a hip flask" in the course of explaining his writing process I challenged everyone in earshot to write a story with that title. Some people actually did.

Sando finished hers in time for us to read it, and in my defense I know perfectly well that it's better than what I wrote. I'm hoping to see some of the others this week.

Well, here's my mediocre entry, a thirty-page monstrosity that represents the bulk of my work this term: Our Bold Hero's "A night and a half with a hip flask." It took forever to write from the perspective of a drunkard, by the way. Yeah, I was surprised too.

Ah, but that wasn't enough, I was still six double-spaced pages short of my fifty. So I slapped together "Wilderness," which is probably a much better story, yesterday and today. If "slapped together" is the right word for my incredibly slow writing process.

Dintenfass always says it's not what you're writing now, it's what you're writing ten years from now. And I think to myself: what if I'm working on the same project?

If you ever want to read this stuff it'll also be available on the Fiction page. Needless to say you should have other priorities.

That was a good class, Sando and Ol' Layout came up with some great fiction for the last day so I had fun homework instead of just philosophy stuff. The Cheerful Cynic wasn't that annoying, and budding writer Cinnamon didn't really say much of anything at all -- she was obviously intimidated, so I felt kinda bad about that. There was overall a real abundance of good fiction, at least on the days when we had class.

The one real irritation was Tracer Bullet, a would-be noir writer who, despite having very insightful things to say about many of the works, earns my eternal opprobrium for proving once again that my adviser hates me. After being told (reminded, really) that I couldn't use stuff I'd written earlier in the year to satisfy the page requirement I was shocked to see Tracer get credit for a novel he wasn't even planning to revise this term. He wrote nothing for the class, as far as I can tell.

It was up there with The Feminist's special exemption from Prof. Dintenfass's "life experience" rule my freshman year, when both of us tried to get in.

Well, I don't mean to get frustrated at the end here. It's good to be done. Er, close to done.