I have nothing to show for the past many weeks since my last post, unless you count a fine review at Tangent SF of my story "Test" in Lightspeed Magazine.  Mostly, I have been following the Republican presidential primary race; I confess I had expected my interest to flag once Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich dropped out, but Mitt Romney turns out to be a gift that keeps on giving.  It is becoming all too clear that he, like George W. Bush before him, is a malignantly narcissistic sociopath.  I hope to see him get his ass handed to him in November.

Later:  I have completed the ArmadilloCon 34 programming survey, by means of which the con committee supposedly will figure out what to do with me, and now I have galley proofs of a story called "The End in Eden" to correct for Analog.  Tomorrow being Mother's Day, I shall honor me sainted gray-haired mum's request that I attend services at her church.  In her heart of hearts, she always hopes I'm going to have a conversion experience just any moment now -- never mind that I'm an atheist of long standing and deep conviction.  Ah, well, I don't mind too much.  I shall treat this as an opportunity for sociological observation.

My current bedside book (incidentally) is The Open Conspiracy: H. G. Wells on World Revolution, edited and with a critical introduction by W. Warren Wagar.

Kindly pardon my long silence, faithful readers (all two of you).  I lost my groove early in January and still haven't got it back.  (My libido is AWOL, too.)  Fortunately, I've had to look no farther for entertainment than the ongoing Republican clown show, a.k.a. primaries.  I wish Molly Ivins had lived to see it and comment upon it in her inimitable way, but I must be satisfied to contemplate Rick Santorum and recall Mark Twain's line about a "solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity."

In any event, I am breaking into print all over the place, or nearly so.  My story "Test" is now available online at Lightspeed Magazine, along with an Author Spotlight essay titled "Science Fiction and What It Means to Me, or Something."  In case it's escaped anybody's attention, another story, "The Tortoise Grows Elate," appears in the March/April F&SF and has already elicited two or three disapproving reviews.  Still another, "Crime and Punishment," is in Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers' Unfit for Eden: Postscripts 26/27, a typically good-looking, well-made anthology from PS Publishing, with offerings by Michael Bishop, Kit Reed, Jessica Reisman, Neal Barrett, Jr., and other worthies.  You can find mine 'n' whatsisname's "The City Quiet as Death" in The Door Gunner and Other Perilous Flights of Fancy: A Michael Bishop Retrospective (Subterranean Press).  Still more Utley stories are forthcoming in the July Asimov's and a fall-dated issue of Analog.  Collect 'em all.

Finally, I am going to be at ArmadilloCon in Austin, Texas, during the last weekend of July.  Hope to see you there.

Without my going into grisly details, this has been more of a week than I bargained for -- certainly not the kind you want to kick off a new year with.  On the plus side, however, Stan Schmidt has accepted my story "The End in Eden" for Analog, and Gary Salvidge has written a terrific review of Ghost Seas.

It takes so little to make me happy.

Today I experienced a moment of existential homesickness for Austin, Texas.  I am, I realized (and hardly for the first time during the 5,000-plus days and nights I've spent here since 1997, never mind the 1400 or 1500 days and nights I spent here during the 1960s), bored with my little Tennessee town -- terminally bored, bored to tears, bored to death, bored spitless, bored shitless, bored beyond the ability of mere words to describe.  I've been thrown back upon my own resources for so long that they are finally exhausted; now I need input.  I need to get away, and get hugged and kissed, and be made much of for a little while, and feel that I am still connected to a community of intelligent, creative people, even one located a thousand miles away.  I have reached the end of my tether.  I'm going crazy here.

I started this week tinkering with a promising story fragment sent me (at my request) by the immensely talented camillealexa but got sidelined by a chest cold.  Here it is Friday, and I'm still not back in the groove.

On the plus side, however, Gordon Van Gelder notified me on Tuesday (as I languished upon my bed of pain) that he is taking another story of mine for F&SF, originally called "Redemption" but rechristened, at virtually the last moment, "The Boy Who Drank From Lovely Women."  Despite that title, it is not a vampire yarn.

And today I received a hundred-dollar check for the right to reprint my "Deviation From a Theme" in an ape-themed anthology -- actually the second such reprint in the second such anthology, the first being Michel Parry's The Rivals of King Kong (1978).  Life is good, chest cold notwithstanding.

Today an anthologist offered me a hundred dollars for the right to reprint a story that appeared in Galaxy in 1976.  Is there anything sweeter about being a writer than getting paid, again, for work you did thirty-five years ago?

Sunday afternoon is a dying fall -- irredeemable by anything short of crazed-weasel sex and plenty of it -- and I am now faced with the task of preparing for my return to the workaday world tomorrow morning, after spending nine days off in my own little world.  Mainly it is a matter of bearing in mind that they were nine days mostly well spent, even without the crazed-weasel sex.  I confess that I got somewhat less writing done than I had originally hoped, less than I'd managed back in early October, but I do have four new (or, anyway, "new") stories to show for the time.  (Today I put the finishing touches on "The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind," all 1250 words of it.  The title is taken from H. G. Wells.)  One of the stories has already found a nice home.  I can hardly complain, can I?

Today is my 63rd birthday.  I went shopping for clothes (yes, even men need to go shopping for clothes at least every five years) and had lunch with me sainted gray-haired mum, bought some CDs in Murfreesboro (Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderly, Leadbelly, Buddy Guy, Crosby, Stills &  Nash, Joe Walsh -- gotta love those bargain bins!), and marveled at all the birthday best wishes posted on my "wall" at Facebook.  You'd almost think I wuz somebody.  Tomorrow, it's back to work trying to thin out the contents of my Unfinished Stories file.  I have no new (nor even "new") story to show for the past three days, but Tuesday's mail did bring me a check from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for "The Tortoise Grows Elate," and Wednesday morning I received word via e-mail from John Joseph Adams that he wants "Test" for Lightspeed Magazine, so I can still claim to be a functioning writer.

Last Friday, still having vacation time I needed to use or lose, I elected to take all this week off and see what my muse (the little bitch) and I might accomplish.  Thus far, we have turned out the second part of a diptych, the 4000-word "Test" ("Shattering" was the first part), the 6275-word "In Deep" -- originally written in the mid-1970s and accepted by Mystery Monthly, which promptly went belly-up -- and the 4575-word "Redemption," which had existed in fragmentary form since the spring of 1991.  I have no idea what I'll be working on tomorrow, but as long as I'm working on something, I shan't complain.

I have been A Writer this weekend, or something like my idea of one, anyhow, drinking rum, communing with cats, wishing I were in the toils of an ill-advised affair with a loose and crazy woman instead of actually writing, oh, and actually writing.  Last week Sheila Williams took the 3000-word "Zip" for Asimov's Science Fiction -- my fifty-first sale to that magazine since 1977 -- so today I sent her the 4150-word "Shattering," which has been through countless plague-y drafts since 1972, at one time enriched Ted White's Amazing/Fantastic inventory, and during 40 years refused to let me simply abandon it as an unworkable effort.  Sheila will of course let me know if I've finally got it right.  In the meantime, I've already moved on to another project or, more accurately, another phase of the same project.  I think "Shattering" may be part of a diptych or even a triptych, but won't know for certain unless and until I finish part two and perhaps part three.  Which means more actual writing ahead for me, instead of the ill-advised affair with the loose and crazy woman.  Damn.