Some columnist on Salon wrote a while ago that "Unfinished projects are like rocks in our pockets," and that seems about right- I still find myself, half asleep on the subway, playing around with characters and plot that - like all but the barest pretense of my ambition to write fiction- I abandoned years ago: A weird post modern but vaguely autobiographical tale, of filming a Superman movie at a Jewish day camp for 8 year olds, and then re-enacting our ancestors escape from Germany, complete with the counsellours playing border guards and giving us lie detector tests (unfortunately, I overloaded it with too much postmodern hoohah.) A character piece about a guy I went to boarding school with who struggled to be the straightest of the straight arrows and is now wandering homeless in Central Park (could never get a handle on the character, possibly because I really disliked him at school. Did have an amusing bit about him trying to pawn a small Rodin sculpture. ) Neither have been touched since, charitably, speaking, summer 1999, but I can't get rid of them, and I may have to write them just for purging purposes. Of course part of the reason I can't get rid of them is that all my notes for the stories are still on my Palm Pilot.