After crushing through 30K+ words in the first half of last November for NaNoWriMo, I promptly shelved my first draft collection of short stories based on Japanese myths, legends, and folklore. My thoughts at the time were to swing back around to the urban fantasy novel I’d finished earlier in the year — the novel that needed a ton of work at the plot level. The plot level I wound up futtzing with but mostly ignoring until last month (a topic for another blog post).

Flashback to a pre-Covid-19 lo...