For those of you who aren't into modern Canadian folk, Gordon Lightfoot was (arguably) one of the best singer-songwriters the True North ever produced.  The man had a prolific musical career into his seventies, and twenty one albums.

Music trivia aside, the reason why I've mentioned the man is because he has some of the tightest writing around.  

I only found this out after reading an article on the website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard that deconstructs the lyrics to one of his songs, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald", (about a freight ship that sank in Lake Superior with all hands in the 1970's) and uses it as a 457 word news clip (or non-fiction story) without adding any subtext, footnotes, anything.  It's brilliantly done, and can be found here:  [link].  If you're into short fiction, nonfiction, (or, hell, how about songwriting?), this ability to capture the spirit and details of an event, in under 500 words, and make it poetic is beautiful*.  

In other (not brilliant) news, I've been plugging away at Pit Stop.  Might get another excerpt up here sometime next week.

In order to get my Muse back to her job of delivering obscure messages to me at odd hours of the day or night, I've been pounding away at another 40k short piece.  It's the expansion of a story fragment I uploaded three months ago, called "Deadline."  This improved story is called "The Documentarist."  At the moment, it's 4,001 words, so I might break it up into three or four manageable chunks.  Or would it be better if I left it intact?  Hoping to finish it in the next few days while I plan out a long-fiction noir piece (or novella, methinks) called "Overpowered."  

But more on that later.

*By the way, it also made it to No. 2 on the pop charts^ of the day.

^That's right.  A Canadian FOLK SONG made it to a Top 40 chart of any description.  It was that good.