The short story is almost finished. The ending occurred to me while I was taking a walk this morning, on a break from work. I always knew how the very end of the story would go, but the matter of getting there from the beginning of the end was presenting me with a logistical challenge. But then it came to me, as I crunched across the frozen courtyard of the Harvard Medical School, and I laughed out loud, because I knew right then and there beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was going to finish this goddamned story after all, my first completed piece of fiction in ten years. I think I'm going to attempt the grand finale this weekend. Wish me luck.

In other news, I discovered yesterday on Dispatches From Revland, another favorite blog of mine (I should really make a list of links), that there are people out there turning old Dungeons and Dragons adventures (a.k.a. "dungeon modules") into honest-to-goodness books. Don't believe me? The novelization of The Keep on the Borderlands, a dungeon module that came with every Basic Rules Set, is available for sale at Amazon.com right now. Go ahead. Buy it. I dare you. Revland will even get the commission, if you do.

Because I obviously have too much free time at work - witness the Binder Clip Monsters - and in the interest of fluffing my monthly statistics, I then decided to see if any libraries out there had cataloged any dungeon modules and actually shelved them in their stacks. I punched "Keep On The Borderlands" into OCLC, the massive electronic catalog that connects more than 20,000 libraries all over the world, and lo and behold, there were available lenders! Not many, mind you, but it just boggled the mind that a librarian had seen fit to acquire, catalog, and circulate a copy of something that was such an indispensable fixture of my geeky childhood (as opposed to my geeky adulthood). Delighted and disturbed, I tried the names of other classic adventures - Against The Giants, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and the immortal slaughterfest Tomb of Horrors - and found at least one library for each that wasn't ashamed to admit having a copy in their stacks. O brave new world, that has such people in it. Today's young geeks just don't know how good they have it. Comic books have gone mainstream, fantasy roleplaying is the stuff of best-selling games for Sony Playstations, and local shopping malls hold weekend-long training sessions and tournaments for the latest collectible card games. Hollywood action hero Vin Diesel is even a proud D&D player. Where were these people, when I was busy getting slammed into lockers back in the 80's. Ah, well. Better late than never, I guess.

Needless to say, I ordered some D&D modules on Interlibrary Loan, for old time's sake.