Random Observations on Living in a New Place

My cat has become a balcony slut.


In the old place – y’know, the one with the awesome view of all the tasty water birds in the pond – my cat would remain outside for about thirty seconds, tops, before demanding to be let back inside. Here, she’s at the door the second I start putting on my coat to head out for a smoke, and refuses to come back in for several minutes after I’m done.

I don’t understand my cat. Then again, are cats really understandable?

Below is a fair approximation of our living situation:


Of course, it’s not like that now. We have boxes absolutely everywhere. But the living room’s put together enough for the cat to enjoy her new loveseat and recliner. She lets me sit on them sometimes. I appreciate her generosity.


Tomorrow, I get to determine where the fuck I put all of the shelf pegs. Without them, shelving the bajillion boxes of books will be a non-starter. There’s a trillion and one things to do before we’re fully settled. But so far, living on our own is awesome indeed.

Random Observations on Living in a New Place
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Things I Learn About Myself at the Pacific Science Center

Every time I drop by the Pacific Science Center, I learn new things about meself.

Today, I discovered I could hit my target weight immediately by moving to Saturn.

Madegascar hissing cockroaches don’t give me the creeps. Much.

And I’ve gots to get me that globe filled with rheoscopic fluid that demonstrates the atmospheric turbulence on gas giants like Jupiter. I thought the flat disc full of the stuff was teh awesome, but it’s merely nifty compared to a globe of it. And guess what? You can at least get balls of the stuff for $6.95 at stevespanglerscience.com. If anyone knows where to find an empty clear plastic globe on a stand, let me know.

I’m a sucker for fluid turbulence, and I didn’t even know it till now…

This is why communities need science centers. Getting your hands on stuff, getting to play and explore, seeing something new or something old in a new way, is enormously enriching as well as entertaining.

The floor is open, my darlings. Tell me what you learn about yourselves when you go play in the fields o’ science.

Things I Learn About Myself at the Pacific Science Center

Remembering What I Loved

Socializing IRL was rather a bit of a shock. I live one of those semi-hermetic lives in which I’m perfectly happy home alone, but even hermits need to kick up their heels every once in a while.

Won’t be at the Rodeo Steakhouse again, though. Who the fuck makes a margarita with Jack Daniels? And then they started blaring really awful country and western at us. It’s a good thing we were close to home, and the roomie was gone. Alas for my poor friend, he got to go waltzing down memory lane with me. Yup. I busted out the photo albums.

It was initially because we’re going to Arizona, and I was showing him some of the places we’d be visiting. Wupatki National Monument and Sunset Crater. The San Francisco Peaks. Places where I roamed happily through all the years of my young life. I’d subject you to those pics, too, but alas, they are not digital, and Dana has no scanner. Dana is not only a hermit, but technologically impoverished.

I left home because I’d fallen out of love. Sometimes, to love a place again, you have to leave it. Spend some years elsewhere. Now, the irritating memories are faded, and the fun ones bubble to the surface. Running flat-out over the slickrock along a mesa in Page, with nothing between me and a 100-foot fall but a ledge four inches wide and a tenuous grip on sandstone. Standing on the side of a mountain surrounded by golden aspens and gazing out over miles of wilderness in the clear Arizona skies. Roaming the rooms of ruins, wondering what it was like to live in such small spaces.

There are things I miss. Strangely, dry dirt looms foremost in my mind. I love the sound of my shoes grating through gritty soil and rock as I roam. Northern Arizona’s a place built from volcanoes. You can feel it when you run the earth through your hands. You see it all around you, in the cinder cones, the andesitic peaks, the ridge lines and the lava flows. There is a particular place at Sunset Crater where you can stand and stare into the heart of the caldera that splits the San Francisco Peaks. There is nothing like gazing into that beauty and realizing it resulted from catastrophic destruction. If there were people living there when the mountain erupted, they must have been mightily impressed.

I miss the demarcation between alpine climes and the desert. One side of the Sunset Crater/Wupatki National Monument is all Ponderosa pine. In just a few miles, you pass through juniper and piñon pine trees, and then, abruptly, the high desert looms. This Nasa Earth Observatory satellite image will give you some idea: we’re looking northeast, from the pines to the Painted Desert:


For an absolutely spectacular aerial view of Sunset Crater with the desert on the horizon, go here.

All of this awesome stuff used to be my back yard. I could roam ancient plate boundaries, see the remnants of ancient underwater eruptions and seas, visit dinosaur tracks, wander at will through forests, deserts and plains – all without driving more than an hour or two from home.

Those were the good things. I do remember the bad as well – Northern Arizona has very little in the way of big-city culture, and Phoenix is, well, Phoenix. I definitely prefer Seattle. And it’s nice not to feel dessicated all the time.

But I loves me my original home state. It’ll be teh awesome to go adventuring there again. I especially can’t wait to tramp through Wupatki one more time.

What about you lot? Any nostalgia for the places you’ve left behind, or are you of the “ran away and never looked back” persuasion? And do you believe it’s at all right for a restaurant to offer up a margarita that contains not one drop of tequila?

Remembering What I Loved

How I Feel Today


I’ve just finished one of the most painful ninety minutes’ worth of writing ever. It is very hard to extract useful thoughts from your brain when it’s sizzling, and in fact on the verge of bursting into flame.

I just realized I haven’t taken a few hours off to just go and play since November. When I haven’t been blogging, I’ve been working on my fiction, or reading serious tomes for same, or attending the day job. It’s a good thing I have plans to head out for a steak with a friend tonight. Whether I’ll remember how to hold a conversation without typing remains to be seen…

How I Feel Today

Utterly Horrified

I held a baby today, and I liked it.

This is one of those things that terrify me, because while I like children in the abstract, and I certainly like them alive and healthy and cared for, I’ve never been one for cooing over the infants. Let other people hold them. They’re sticky, incomprehensible, and fragile. I don’t even think they’re all that cute until they’re at least four years old. Other people melt into a puddle of goo when faced with a baby. I do not.

I’m afraid I’m slipping.

My friend and her wife swung by work with their four month-old today. The cries of “Aaawww! Bebbe!” rebounded from the call center walls. And my first thought was, “Oshit. They’re going to come over here and expect me to hold the damned thing.”

They did. Out of a sense of obligation, gingerly, I accepted the offered child. Lodged him on a bony hip. Stared into dark blue-gray eyes. And he fit. It’s rare that I feel comfortable with a infant in my arms, but he felt like he belonged right there. Not as cute as a cat, not as fun as a five year-old who can be your excuse to go out and dig up ant lions and build forts and generally relive the sense of adventure you lost when you started having to pay your own bills, but still, here was a baby propping himself against my shoulder so he could have a good look around from a reasonable height, and I wasn’t freaking out. I was even enjoying having the little bugger around.

Fuck.

Thankfully, before I could get really mushy-gushy, I got a call and had to heave the kid back at his moms. I am left with a slightly better understanding as to why certain people are so anxious to have one of these things, but secure in the knowledge that I still do not have any desire to actually have one myself. After a bit of self-interrogation tonight, I realize that my determination to enjoy the joys of lack-of-motherhood is still strong as ever. It’s just that now I can truly see myself in the role of maiden aunt.

I can now see myself getting an early start on spoiling the little buggers rotten.

Why I thought you all should know this, I have no idea. But I know at least one of you is going to enjoy this immensely. I’ll take my “I told you so” on pumpernickel, thankee kindly.

Utterly Horrified

I Owe the Orient

Today’s disclaimer provided by Kaden:

As your friend and consort, I’m tempted to be offended that so much attention in this blog as been trained solely on politics and interweb humor that you have to put a disclaimer when you are posting about writing or the processes involved. Really, Dana. It’s your blog, write whatever you damn well please – I’d much rather see more mind exercises than more articles about why the world is fucked anyway.

I’m not sure how many of the rest of you feel the same, but I have too much fun with disclaimers to brush them off so easily. Besides, just because it’s my cantina and I can fill it with whatever I damned well please doesn’t mean the rest of you all have to read every damned word. Although I very much much appreciate those of you who do. All right, I appreciate those of you who cherry-pick, too, but the others get a little extra. So there.

I owe a huge damned debt to Eastern philosophy.

Back in the bad old days when 99% of my thinking was still stuck in the Judeo-Christian, Western traditions I’d been steeped in since birth, my story world felt stilted. Ordinary. Ho-hum. Incomplete. Wrongo. I didn’t have philosophical concepts for what I felt to be true. Do you know how weird that is? Writers go through a very odd experience as they write. They’re the ones creating this stuff out of whole cloth, it’s their story and they can tell it any way they want. It’s not like the story is some entity outside of them, right? Not like history, where some fact is staring you in the face going, “I just annihilated everything you thought you knew, mwah-ha-ha!” I mean, this stuff isn’t really real, it doesn’t really exist. So where the hell does the throat-clearing come from?

Because stories do that. They sit there silently shaking their heads. They thump the writer over the head, saying, “Ur doin it rong, genius.” There you were, beavering away, on a roll, getting up to supersonic speeds, and suddenly the whole damned thing derails. You realize that everything you thought you knew was wrong.

But the hell of it is, you don’t know why.

I went through that a lot. Still do. But not as much as in the past. For several years now, I’ve felt that the basic concept is solid. Granted, I recently realized I’ve got to go back and work out the science, but that’s microscopic potatoes compared to the structural work I used to have to do. And the cultural stuff is coming together nicely.

It’s all because of Buddhism. Well, that, and a heaping helping of Hinduism, Confucianism, and a plethora of other Eastern religions and philosophies, not to mention a liberal sprinkling of atheism.

My stories have always wanted to be Eastern stories. They were desperately unhappy with me trying to force them into the Judeo-Christian-Western shape that was all I ever knew. Take Eternals, my beings-of-energy whose physics I haven’t quite worked out, but whose philosophy is coming closer. I’d conceived of them as something like gods. Specifically, Western-style gods. And it just never worked. I didn’t want to write about meddling, patriarchial buggers. More to the point, such buggers didn’t fit the story at all, and got rejected like an uncomfortable pair of shoes. But those were the only shoes I had. There I was, barefoot, and my feet are too tender for that sort o’ thing.

After many, many years of reading all of the Eastern philosophy I could lay my hands on, shedding the last bit of Christian disdain and fully embracing those strange philosophies, I could finally write this about Eternals:

I keep asking my Athesean folk what it’s like to relate to an Eternal, what it means to them, how it feels, and all I’m getting is a bunch of infuriating, knowing smiles. That’s it. There are no words. No way to convey it. Totally experiential. Which is a bugger for a wordsmith, I am here to tell you.

I might as well be trying to explain what happened when the Buddha raised up a single flower, and Mahakashyapa smiled. The whole Zen Buddhist movement happened in that moment. Can I tell you what it was all about? No. And no one else can, either. Not even the Buddha. “I have the Eye of the True Law, the secret essence of nirvana, the formless form, and the ineffable realm of Dharma. Without depending on words or letters, a special transmission beyond all teaching, this I pass to Mahakashyapa,” the Buddha said. And he handed him the flower.

I have a strong feeling that every moment with Tarlah is like this. And that’s why none of them can tell me what it was like. Can you imagine Mahakashyapa trying to explain that whole episode on Vulture Mountain to somebody? You can’t put the ineffable into words – that’s what ineffable means. Words talk completely around it, point to it just about as well as somebody with extreme palsy and a severe stutter trying to direct you to the tacky tourist trap on Route 66: they can’t get you there, can’t ever say what it’s really like.

But hey, at least the Atheseans have a special pronoun for Eternals. Trying to get that across in English bites. Don’t want to call Tarlah it – that implies a thing, something without mind, consciousness, will. But call Tarlah he or she, and a whole new load of baggage comes down. Tarlah is not a he, she or it. I’m not even sure Tarlah’s a what. Not a what that you can deconstruct and explain.

Imagine this conversation: an Outlander has just asked an Athesean what Tarlah is. The Athesean says, “An Eternal.”

“Yes, but what is an Eternal?” the Outlander asks.

“An Eternal.”

“That’s no answer!” The frustrated Outlander points to a cloud. “That’s like telling me a cloud’s a cloud. What a cloud is is a collection of water vapor suspended in the atmosphere!”

The Athesean looks at the fluffy, beautiful, ever-changing cloud and says, “Is that really what a cloud is?”

“Yes!”

“Everything that it is, was, could and will be; everything that it means? Are those things in your definition? Or are they only in the word cloud?” The Athesean points in turn. “I say a cloud is a cloud, and that is all that it is. An Eternal is an Eternal, and I have told you everything about Tarlah.”

That may sound a little Zen, but it’s not. A truly Zen answer would be to point to Tarlah. At one time on Athesea, this was possible. But Tarlah’s in Exile, he can no longer be pointed to, and there are those who have never experienced him. So they’re having the same problem I’m having. Explain a cloud in its totality to someone who has never
watched one soar across the sky, never seen it turn from dragon to ship to pirate to rain, never felt it rain down, never tasted the air when it’s cloudy. It can’t really be done. You can’t ever convey the essence of a cloud to a person who’s never experienced one. You can tell something about it, but you can’t capture it completely. And that’s what it’s like trying to convey Tarlah: Tarlah can be experienced, and only then can you know the truth of Tarlah, of the Eternal.

There we go. We haven’t got shoes yet, but we’ve at least got socks. It’s something, anyway.

Then there’s the poetry war story I’m writing. Before I studied Eastern philosophy, I had no idea what the hell that was all about. How could two people reciting poetry unite a whole bunch of different species together into one people?

This is how:

I just figured out where the whole thing’s going, what I really want to do with it: it’s a story about third choices. People are so locked into seeing things a certain way that it’s hard for them to conceive of it any other way. And at the end of the story, in jest, a third way is presented, and their whole viewpoint changes. It really, literally, changes the world.

I’m reminded of a wonderful Zen anecdote.

Master Shui Lao asked Ma Tsu, “What is the true meaning of the coming from the West?” Ma Tsu then knocked him down with a kick to the chest: Shui Lao was greatly enlightened. He got up, clapping his hands and laughing loudly, and said, “How extraordinary! How wonderful! Instantly, on the tip of a hair, I’ve understood the root soure of myriad states of concentration, and countless subtle meanings.” Then he bowed and withdrew.

Afterward, he would tell the assembly, “From the time I took Ma Tsu’s kick up until now, I haven’t stopped laughing.”

The important thing is, a sharp unexpected action, instant enlightenment, endless laughter.

It was that laughter I had seen in the Atheseans, without ever recognizing it. Until I had the koan. Until I had Eastern philosophy to point a little more accurately in the right direction.

Here we go with the Eastern parallels again: the Master can’t give you enlightenment, can’t force it on you, but can help create the conditions that will lead to your enlightenment. Pretty similar thing here. Unity had to come from within. And this poetry cycle was the Master’s shout, the kick, the koan, that led to a mass awakening in a world that was ripe for it. “How can you choose between one?” You can’t. And so the Atheseans didn’t. This whole cycle, this war masquerading as a poetry contest, came about because Atheseans had stopped seeing themselves as one. This cycle brought them back into being as an indivisible whole. It has kept them unified for tens of thousands of years. And sure, they bicker, they disagree, but they don’t get so wrapped up in the differences that they stop appreciating the fundamental oneness. They are many species, many cultures, but one people, in a way that no human civilization I know of has quite managed to achieve. And in performing this cycle every spring, they reinforce that. They remind themselves that they are, in fact, one.

Oneness is vital. Whenever I’m thinking of Athesea, I’m thinking of the Upanishads. Tat tvam asi. Thou art that. When I first read that, it hit me like a thunderbolt. “Thou art that.” It’s so close to how the Atheseans think. They aren’t searching for oneness because they realized long ago they already are one.

I still haven’t quite grasped it. Atheseans aren’t Buddhists, after all, nor Hindus, but an alien civilization with their own history, culture and traditions. But enlightenment is like the sun shining just over my shoulder. Eventually, I’ll turn around, see it, and then it will be my turn to start laughing and never stop.

Is there a lesson contained herein for other writers? Perhaps. I’m sure that not all writers think this way, but storytelling for me is a process of discovery. The story already knows what it needs to be. It’s up to me to discover what it’s trying to tell me. That has led me to study comparative mythology, science, history, other civilizations, delve deep into subjects I thought I had no interest in. Everything becomes fascinating when you start to discover what your story has been trying to say all along.

As Shunryu Suzuki said:

The most important thing is to find out what is the most important thing.

I Owe the Orient

Thoughts on Exile and the Importance of Detail

***Warning: This post contains no hot Smack-o-Matic action. It does not bash inane politicians, crazy religious people, or general stupidity. It contains no lolcats or other items of humor. If you are one of those people who is driven to suicidal boredom by watching the inner workings of a writer’s mind, please exit this post immediately. By continuing to read this post, you agree to hold the blog and its author harmless from any and all damages that may result.***

I’ve been thinking about exile a lot lately.

Seattle is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I love it here (except when it’s snowing on a day when I have to drive somewhere). And yet, I often feel like an exile. This is a sensation I indulge, because so many of my characters are also in exile.

There is a difference between me and them: when I’m actually making a vaguely above poverty level living at writing, I can go home. They can’t. For some, home no longer exists: for others, home’s still there, but they’ve been exiled from their original bodies, which means they can never experience home in quite the same way again.

That last bit hadn’t struck me until tonight, as I was reading through various and sundry notes in a desperate attempt to bring some semblance of order to the chaos. I hadn’t been thinking of my Ahc’ton origins story as an exile story, but that’s exactly what it is.

(For those of you just joining us, Ahc’ton are folks who gave up immortality in order to be reborn among those who need them. Don’t ask me exactly how it’s done because I don’t know yet.)

Think about it. How much more exiled can you get than being reborn in not just a different body, but a different body in an entirely different species than your own? Even if you were able to go back home, your senses would experience it completely differently. It would seem nothing like what you remembered. It would look, feel, smell, taste and hear completely alien. You don’t even have your body to take with you into that exile. Fairly jarring, I’d expect.

I’ve been getting a good sense of displacement – of feeling things are never quite right, my senses expecting one thing and getting another, comparing sensation from one place to another – but that’s going to have to increase exponentially for imagining life as an Ahc’ton. Perhaps their bodies feel as if they belong to the world they’re on, while their minds struggle with the sensory input and memories of their former lives. I know one of my characters frequently feels that exile-of-mind. When he’s not paying attention, he’ll try to take a step with four legs when his current body’s got only two.

Ahc’ton remember. It’s the whole point of being Ahc’ton – you’re supposed to take your full memory, your experience, with you and put it to use for people who need it, but also need you to be able to apply it from within. Ahc’ton have to be two things at once. They have to be integrated with the cultures they’re born in to while at the same time maintaining an objective distance. They’re serving the interests of the people they’re born among, but over and above those interests is the duty they were born for. And their duty is ultimately to their original civilization, because without that one surviving strong and intact, the whole shebang goes boom. And when I say the whole shebang, I mean it: the entire universe, ladies and gentlemen.

So there’s another piece to their exile, one that many exiles experience: never being one thing or the other. Being a stranger everywhere you go. Only for them, there’s the added component of being a stranger within your own body. Human exiles, at least, never have to worry about such a thing. They get to take their bodies with them. If they lose everything else, at least their senses aren’t completely different (with exceptions, o’ course, for dramatic injuries, but still, you’re human).

One of the things I catch myself doing constantly is comparing Seattle to Arizona: “In Arizona, the rug I just washed would already be dry.” “I miss dry dirt.” “65 degrees up here feels just about right; in Phoenix, I’d be freezing fucking cold.” “There’s a lot more flowers to smell up here, but it all kind of gets lost in the cacophany; in Phoenix, you really notice when the orange trees bloom.” And, when I get lost in Seattle’s labyrinthine streets: “The Valley sucks leper donkey dick, but at least it’s laid out on a damned grid.”

Now I’ll have to take that a step further, because we’re comparing not just places, but bodies. At least I realized I already have a jumping-off point: any of you who are getting older will know what I mean when I say that I’m constantly comparing my body now vs. my body when I was young, very nearly flexible, and above all not creaking in ye olde joints. It’s not quite the caliber of “Back when I was a quadruped,” but it’ll do for a start. The only problem with this portion of our program is that it’ll make me more aware of how much my body’s beginning to age. If you hear me complaining more about My Body These Days, you’ll know the reason why.

Some of you may be thinking, “Jeez, Dana, OCD much?” Most people believe writing is a matter of having a few ideas, some characters, a plot, and the ability to write in complete sentences. Shake, bake and serve. Some writers even believe that. They don’t get bogged down in the minutae. But you’ll notice that the writers who wrote really mind-blowing fiction are the ones who could rattle off every last detail about their worlds. Their writing might be as sparse as floral smells in Phoenix, but you get the sense that if you asked, they could rattle off the ancestory of each character down to the tenth generation, and describe the exact shape, size and texture of each button on their shirt.

Is it really important to know that stuff? I believe that it is. Maybe not every last piddling detail, but enough that the world you’ve created is a fully realized place, with a history of its own, populated by characters who didn’t just poof into existence on Page 1 and who will continue to live rich lives of their own long after you’ve typed The End – unless, of course, you killed them off at some point.

Consider this advice from one of Louis L’Amour’s characters from The Walking Drum:

“Trust your instincts. Life teaches us much of which we are not aware. Our senses perceive things that do not impinge upon our awareness, but lie dormant within us, affecting our recognition of people and conditions.”

What a writer is doing by exploring their world in such detail is creating an instinct for it. And when you’ve done that, when all of that knowledge is lying dormant within you, it affects the people and conditions of the story, and does so in such a natural way that it helps create the facade of reality. Think of the stories you’ve read that had you feeling as if you were reading about a real place. That feeling comes from the author having developed it in such depth that the writing itself became almost a matter of instinct. It becomes instinctive to the reader, too. Things that happen, while they may surprise you, make perfect sense and feel right because you’ve developed an instinctive awareness of the story’s environment and the people within it.

And so, that’s my excuse for exploring things in such depth, obsessing over the slightest detail, extrapolating from my own experience and then taking it exponentially further. But creating a world that feels really real is only part of it. Exploring those details opens up new potential. The most inconsequential detail can end up having huge
dramatic impact, taking the plot in a completely different direction from what you’d considered, or changing the relationship between characters in a subtle but fundamental way. It can keep the story from following much-treaded paths. One detail can change absolutely everything.

You just won’t know which one until you’ve got as many as you can lay your hands on. And that means only one thing: the people who told you writing fiction is easy lied like Dick Cheney.

Thoughts on Exile and the Importance of Detail

I've Gots 'Splaining To Do

Regulars to the cantina have probably noticed a rather abrupt falling off in volume lately. There’s a reason for that. I’ve just been too busy to ‘splain.

Writing fiction again, you see.

My Christmas tradition for these many years has been to shut out the rest of the world and put the extra day or two off to good advantage. I haven’t written fiction in months, didn’t even have scenes running through my mind, but that was no reason not to write. I’ve missed fiction. So, instead of world-building, instead of research, instead of those one-billion-and-one things I should be doing, I just started writing scenes for the sheer delight of wordsmithing. I skipped around here, there and everywhere within my universe, playing with a description here, a metaphor there, savoring each sentence. And it felt fantastic.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped writing and started reading instead. Last year, I wrote several chapters in a book I wasn’t even supposed to be working on because it comes so late in the sequence. But the scenes were there, demanding to be written. Total compulsion. I justified it by telling myself that I needed to get this stuff down while it was fresh in my mind, and the practice wouldn’t hurt. After all, the first book in the series needs to be outstanding. It’s going to take tremendous skill to pull off what I want to do. Skill is developed by practice. Ergo, use these scenes to practice.

As I was writing, it seemed as if things were inspired. Seemed like I could actually do a fair job of capturing this stuff.

Reading it now, I do not think I was wrong. I found plenty of rough edges – a writer worth their shit will always find flaws with their work. But I also found a lot to be excited about. I used to suck at the mushy-gushy stuff, for instance, which was unfortunate because so much hangs on the unique connections between certain of my characters, deeply emotional relationships beyond mere love and romantic entanglement. Those scenes are now starting to take on the transcendent quality they needed.

I’ve also had an enormously difficult time capturing grief, which was also vital to the story I wanted to tell. That’s getting far easier. And I think I’m avoiding the wanker trap – I’ve never wanted my grieving characters to turn into o-woe-is-me sniveling weenies. They’re stronger than that, despite crushing pain. And those scenes seem to be working too.

There’s an enormous amount of work to be done. As I’ve mentioned before, certain assumptions have to be rethought. There’s a vast amount of worldbuilding still unfinished. I have to go over everything from the beginning, decide what must stay and what can be safely discarded, strengthen the weak areas and figure out the science behind the fantasy. None of it will be easy, but it’s going to be worth doing.

That being so, this blog is likely to see a bit less posting than usual. Apologies in advance, my darlings. I’ll do my best.

(BTW, If anyone wins an insane amount of money in the lottery and wants to free me from my day job with a modest stipend, thus allowing me a full blogging schedule on top of my storytelling duties, I could be persuaded to accept such a thing. Just so’s you know.)

I've Gots 'Splaining To Do

First Day o' Winter


I’ve been watching snow accumulate all night. The traffic cameras show that there are only strips of packed snow where the roads used to be. And it warmed up enough to start drizzling, which means everything’s formed a crust of ice. Snow should not break, but ours is.

Even the buses have forsaken the valley I live in. Apparently, they’ve decided that even with chains, it’s too much of a gamble.

And I’m supposed to go to work tomorrow. I don’t want to call out due to weather again, but if this shit keeps up, I won’t have much choice unless I plan to hoof it the ten miles or so. I don’t.

I’m afraid that if I hear anyone burbling about the joy and wonder of a white Christmas, I shall strangle them with my bare hands.

I fucking hate winter.

First Day o' Winter