I promised myself--and all of you--that I wouldn't talk about my story or the contest again here, but as with most of my promises, it was a far easier thing to make than to keep.

But I do have a good reason for breaking my promise. I've been spending the last few days--in between medical appointments, Christmas parties, and personal responsibilities--trying to pull together some 17,000 words of story fragments into something coherent. I have enough material in a decent-enough state of completion for the first two installments. From the looks of things, my little story is going to be a novella before I'm through, if not a full-fledged novel.