From The Unwritten Library

At times like these I like to remember that I'm almost 40.

After a very long day full of progress bars and upload templates & field management I got drawn back to my imaginary world-  you know the one, the one I go crazy and work on endlessly, the one that I consider to be my main work in life.

So yesterday I realized something I wanted to work on, and then I did work on it. Because I love doing that and being busy and useful to myself.  I do not like washing dishes or cleaning up after myself because those things just don't seem useful.

Actually - let me talk about that thing - see, I was in the midst of the winter malaise because of all the effing cold and dark and I thought "I should have more fruits." But the thing is - I kind of don't like eating fruits. I don't mind them, but I... I don't even know. I like Square Meals. There's hardly any square fruits. What I decided to do was to just make potions for a few weeks. I mean, I got a blender don't I? Ain't I got a blender?! I do, so I bought like, nonsensical amounts of fruits and have been grinding their bones to make my juice. Anyhow - a couple of weeks of heavy potion consumption have left my guts somewhat out of proper order. My thought was to substitute all sugar and candy with fruits and then to drink them up all the time. Anyhow that was fine, as things to do go, except that there's a trashbag full of peels and cartons and peels and washing out the blender is a nuisance and... For all it's dietary imperfections the peanut-butter nutella diet is tidier with less hassles about cleanups. Anyhow I hate cleaning and love messing. I would make a sweet nomad, wandering the earth, littering it with peels and cartons as I move to less messier pastures.

Tomorrow, I'll clean up - I have to, no one will do it for me, and I'm supposed to be a kind of person. The kind of a person who has a clean blender. This reminds me - actually, of when I was a salesman - you'd always be pitching people on how you'd save them from hassles. People hate hassles. I bet 100% of all people dislike hassles, if someone did like hassles, man, I bet you wouldn't even want to know a person like that.

Of course, I like complicated challenges with no payoff a lot. I love that stuff. That's not a hassle. That is weird pleasure.

It came to me that I could work harder on my imaginary country and I realized that I could paint a whole big map of it. I work better from maps - they give good ideas, geography=history you know - all human experiences are predicated and mediated by the local environment, so I work on setting up the world as a bunch of pictures. A bunch of feet by a bunch of feet - this is going to be a big-fun and big fun project. Also? 0 payoff, and extra effort. But washing my blender is a HASSLE. It's weird being alive no? My size 14 shib-shib is thrown in there for scale.

Here's the first pass on the upper northwest corner -

more details to be added, more embellishments to fall, labels, the whole thing.

and for the extra pinch of verisimilitude: