A Few Flapping, Shredded Ends of Creativity

I dreamt last night I was watching a '70s horror film with a premise I found fairly disturbing: A faith-healer who practiced laying-on of hands (it was clear that he was sincere about his gift, though not whether it actually worked) was kidnapped by satanists and turned into a carrier for the apocalyptic plagues mentioned in Revelation, so that everyone he touched, instead of being cured, became infected.

I don't remember any more of the plot, but the idea freaked me out. If anyone wants to use it for anything, feel free -- I want rid of it.

This latest deleted scene from "A Hundred Words from a Civil War", on the other hand, is © me 2010 and you can't have it.

     In every instant a million wounds, a thousand deaths, are inflicted on Oluseyi Hive. Oluseyi feels the agony of them all, absorbs and transcends them. Its enemy, Nishizawa Hive, is assuredly suffering as well.
     Each moment Oluseyi’s distributed intelligence implements a hundred strategies, considers and rejects ten thousand more. Subverted components among the enemy’s stratified, highly specialised military fight fervently for Nishizawa, transmitting their knowledge back to Oluseyi all the while.
     Meanwhile, Oluseyi’s builders and troglodytic burrowers delve ever further into the base-substrate, carving out fortified nurseries for the fertile castes. In some form, Oluseyi will survive any possible defeat.

I may also have finished this year's story for sending out with our Christmas cards -- previous ones are archived here. (Well, only from 2006, when I started writing them, to 2008 -- but 2009's "Stella Maris", which I was particularly pleased with, will be appearing both there and here at some point during Advent.)

Given the extreme difficulty I've been experiencing in finding the necessary coincidence of time, energy and concentration-span to write in the well-over-a-year since the birth of young R., this is a bigger achievement than it sounds.