Also, it's very fickle stuff: you can be told the article is great, wait to hear again for months, be assured the article is going to run; and then see it cut at the last moment. All this time you could have pitched it out to another magazine...and now the issue has list its newsworthiness. At the same time, though, I do like magazine articles because they're current and indicate a kind of activity and effervescence, you might say, that I like to maintain.

Still, for all these reasons (and because I have the great fortune to have a great agent and several book projects underway) for the moment I'm focusing on a few book projects rather than magazine articles--but that doesn't mean I don't have my eye on a few magazine feature ideas bubbling away. When will they be ready? When they're ready :)

There's a new dynamic out there as well: online 'publications'. I still don't know what to think of them. Most of what I've written for periodicals has come out in print...but while print magazines are there for a month or so, and then basically vanish, online articles stick around until...well until our civilization takes a header, I suppose (which could be sooner or later). I've seen both awful and fantastic writing in online venues...and right now I'm just not sure how I'll integrate with this new medium.

A sort of online notebook about what I'm writing at the moment can be found at my blog, Amphibian.