Life is good, in the not-quite-northern bit of Michigan.

The past few days have been a brutal fug of heat and humidity that turned me into a half-melted, grumbling, shambling puddle of sweat without no sense of humor and the shortest of all possible fuses, but heatwave aside, things have been, on the whole, pretty great.

My short story "My Father's Life, Furnished in Stars," was published in the June issue of InterGalactic Medicine Show. (Accompanied by a positively gorgeous illustration by Scott Altmann, which you can see HERE. I don't know which is more delightfully eerie: that the son, in his time-travel suit looks a bit like me, or that the old man in the bed looks like my dad, as he might look as an old, old man.) I don't think there's a way to buy the single issue, and the website only allows a preview of the stories in it, but if you have $15 lying around, the subscription is well worth it, if not for my story, then for Aimee Ogden's "A World Without," and K.D. Julicher's "Burnover," and the fact that a subscription gives you digital access to every back issue of the magazine ever published. Kindle. Nook. Computer. All are welcome, here in this miraculous digital age.

And a spike in subscriptions might make me look good. *wink wink*

Okay. I'm done banging the drum. Let me tell you about the strange and terrifying thing that just happened to me, instead:

I've been working on a novel for the past month or so, in fits and starts, in snippets and snatches, and when I can. More, lately, as I made a bet with a friend about whether or not I could finish the book by the end of this year, and have no intention of putting myself through the rigorous hell that losing that bet would demand.

I was working toward the end of a chapter today. Just writing, putting words after words as they came to me, with a pretty good sense of where things were going, and what was going to happen next. This is often how writing works for me: I can see the general shape of where I am, and where things are headed. I know who characters are, and what they might do in a variety of situations, and why.

The scene I was working on was a sort of quiet, charming interstitial. A scene between strangenesses and horror--a quiet moment, between two characters I knew and liked very much.

And then it wasn't. Just like that. I was writing, and, all of a sudden, in the space between words, I knew what was going to happen--what had to happen--in the next moment, and it was not at all what I thought it would be. It was terrifying. Here I am, God at his keyboard, walking around my little made-up people and putting words into their mouths, dreams into their hearts...

...and suddenly one of them does something I didn't expect him to--didn't want him to. I stopped typing, tried to find the words to put the story back on the path I'd seen in my head only moments before. Before one of the people I'd made up made up his mind and the whole story shifted beneath my feet.

Bizarrely, I couldn't do it. I knew what was going to happen next, and it wasn't at all what I wanted to happen next, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it: this character's decision was simply the next bit of the story, and it didn't matter that it didn't fit with my tidy notes on how this scene would close, and what it would lead to, and so on, and so forth. If I didn't like it, well, too fucking bad, chum.

Even more bizarrely, the story still worked. It worked better. As soon as I knew what he was going to do, I knew also why he was going to do it, and what the implications were going to be, and how the moment would resonate with the rest of the story, and it all worked.

So I wrote what happened next. I have to go to work now, but that's alright: I know where things are going, and I can go there when I wake up tomorrow.

Unless I don't know. But, as a thrilling little moment at my keyboard today taught me, that's fine, too. The book knows where its going. I just need to sit down and go with it, until it's done.

(By the way: if you haven't listened to CocoRosie, particularly their phenomenally, fiercely powerful album Grey Oceans, you should. Really. Every time I come back to this band, I'm stunned by how unlike anybody else they are. They're incredible. Start with "Lemonade." Go everywhere from there.