November was pretty good to me, from a writing perspective. I finally got myself back in gear after what has been quite the roller coaster ride in my personal life and things are finally settling down.

This meant I wrote most every day in November, yes even while I was away in Toronto at SFContario, and yes, even during Thanksgiving. As much better and more experienced writers have told me, writers write. It’s as simple as that, folks. I hope you’ll accept my lapse; somehow I managed to lose sight of this simple fact.

While lots of folk engaged in the annual headrush that is NaNoWriMo, I took a different direction this year. Instead of working on a novel in November, I wanted to write a novella. More specifically, I wanted to draft, edit, rewrite, and polish a novella within the span of the month. And I did. “Barry’s Tale” clocked in at a bit over twenty-thousand words. It’s been sent out to the handful of writers I’ve bandied critiques with for the last many years, and I’ll be receiving their careful considerations later in the month. I’m very much looking forward to it.

But that was November, and because writers write, I can’t just sit around congratulating myself for doing what I’m supposed to be doing. Nope, I need to move on to the next project. In this case, it’s another Amazing Conroy story, “Trial of the Century.” This is something of a necessary story, because it fills in some missing pieces that need to have happened somewhere between the end of the first novel, Buffalito Destiny, and the start of the second novel, Buffalito Contingency. It also features the return of the Arconi, the alien race from the very first Conroy story, the ones who can look you in the eye and know whether or not your telling the truth. The people that Conroy stole his original, fertile buffalito from, and they still don’t know how he did it. In “Trial of the Century” all this will be revealed, and more!

Like “Barry’s Tale,” “Trial” is intended to be one of the new, never-before-seen stories to go in my next book, a compilation of all the short stories about Conroy, so that readers will have them all in one place (which is especially good as several of the original sources are now out of print). The plan is to launch this book with much fanfare at the Worldcon in Chicago.

And now that I’ve brought you up to date, please excuse me, I need to get back to work.