I'm here. Really.

I really am.

I'm just sort of swamped by stuff, stuff that takes attention and thought and time.

Which doesn't leave me much time for anything else.

Sadly, very little of this is writing-related. Well, okay, reading Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History is writing-related, in that it's compost for the heap. I do that a lot nowadays, read things without quite knowing why, but as I read them, I know they're going to end up affecting the fabric of the fantasy. So while there won't be a land war in Asia or colonialism or nationalism (or at least I don't think so--that's not the way the imagination is going), what I've read will still be there, in thread about religion and philosophy and national myths of origin.

And politics. Though that's kind of a quagmire at the moment. Which, it seems to me, politics often is.