Swimming with the fishes

Well, that's what my head feels like, anyway. My little brother so considerately shared his cold with me, and I feel really spacey. I had a Municipal Band concert today and had a conversation with the woman next to me and couldn't focus on what she was saying, couldn't pay attention enough to make eye contact half the time...it was weird. It also slowed down my reaction time--key change? what key change?--and I can't really hear because my ears are going goofy with the pressure. An interesting way to do a concert...

2 weeks until I leave for grad school.

Just finished reading: Mulengro, by Charles DeLint. According to his forward, this is one of his "darker" (meaning more graphically violent and bloody) stories, originally published under the pseudonym Samuel M. Key to distinguish it from his "ordinary" work. Now, I can understand wanting to use a pseudonym if you were, say, a children's book writer wanting to publish your erotic spanking stories, but DeLint's regular work doesn't flinch from the dark side of the human (or inhuman) nature. So maybe this was a little more graphic; was it necessary to separate it by another name, even if you acknowledged it as yours? (He claims he used the psudonym to alert readers that it would be a darker story) What do my writer friends think--would you claim all work as your own? What if you were established in a certain genre, and then wrote something different?

Waifs and Strays, by Charles DeLint. A collection of short stories, most published before in other anthologies, focused on teenage protagonists. Many of the Newford stories I've read before, but there was a whole section of Bordertown tales that makes me want to hunt out that series. Bordertown is apparently a "shared world" that a bunch of authors thought up together and then used as the setting for their stories. It's kind of nice to see that real authors like to do the same thing that my friends and I do. I'm always interested in how collaborative stories work: did each author take a major character and write from his/her point of view? Or did they go by chapter and try to keep the characterizations consistent? Either way, I think it would be a challenge to write something like that, so I appreciate it when it's good. And I like when the authors themselves talk about the process of writing it.