So here's an acronym for ya: OBE. That's Overtaken by Events, and it describes most of my attempts at posting lately. Here, for example, is an entry I started last Tuesday:

I've just taken inventory -- I've written a couple thousand words worth of blog entries since I came to DC, but you wouldn't know it because not a one was ever finished enough to post. I have scraps about the grocery clerk who thought I could see through brown paper bags, about the cab driver who took me along when he stopped for dinner, about the hierarchy of rejection and how it is a rejection letter can make me happy, about what I've done (and not done) on the writing front.

And it's all scrap, possibly salvaged someday but only fragments now.

I'm three hours into my flight back to DC, just under two hours to go and just over twenty hours later than I intended. This is the part where I have some 'splaining to do, not so much the twenty hours but how I came to be back in Seattle for a few days without informing all potentially interested parties.

I had grand intentions, I really did. I always do.

I spent most of my trip at Potlatch, the science fiction convention mentioned below. The much of the rest of the time was a succession of appointments -- hair cut, teeth cleaned, psyche purged, that sort of thing. All very good. Potlatch was good, too. I reconnected with the writing world, and did my first reading. I figured it would only be open to convention goers, but as it turned out I probably could have invited folks. Add it to the Shoulda list.

Five of us read, all members of the Clarion West Class of 2005.

And that's as far as I got. I was going to write about how great it was to read with Cat, Katie, Kira, and Rachel, but I got tangled up in how I would move from that to the news we got just over an hour later about the death of Octavia Butler, our first instructor at Clarion West.

Have you read Octavia Butler? If not, you should.