Learn to overcome the crass demands of flesh and bone.

[kingtycoon]

I'm facing a little bit of loss of momentum right now. When I get home though, my house will be very clean and I think that will pep me up nice.

Plus - the impeccable overman fordmadoxfraud's beneficent gift of noble Whiskey arrived today - so I'll have some whiskey to help out, with the experiences.


My new shoes have shipped, my bills are paid, my life is ordered and all is well - it just feels like it's taken a bit more out of me than it aught to. Winter bullshit, that's what that is - that normal is the new hard - what with all the frozen blood.

I think tonight I'll try to recapture the direction and work on writing books some more, words followed by words. I think I'll try and fabricate some fancy looking sentences about matters that will satisfy me.

Now, me, I blame the academy. I spent those two years at university - writing in the bullshit voiceless, neutral fashion - fangless, declawed - the housecat style of inoffensive unopinionated attempting for objective statements. You know, always about some book you'd have rather not read. Academia, so hard to take seriously as a profession or a lifestyle. I remember thinking about the profs- the old ones - just... bumbling, foolish and overconfident, defensive. The young ones were worse though - chips on their shoulders, something to prove. Middle age seems to be where it is at. I guess. I liked those times.

My dude mordicaisays he's got the plan to split the number of books he reads this year between women and men 50/50 - I figure that's fine, but I look back on all my old primary source materials- from all the college I went to - you know, I mainly had lady professors, and I mainly got on with them best- and they mainly had us read books by other ladies. Also about ladies.

We, over the last few days, have started a new Oz book - we've finished all those by Baum himself, the man and are on to the last one he half wrote- it was taken up by a lady... Can't recall her name - she took up the finishing of it - and went on to write many more. There's a whole section of introduction about L-Frank going home to his people, but that got skipped for bedtime story purposes - nevertheless, I keep my ear to the ground to find the distinct voice rising out of this book - The Royal Book of Oz, for what's in it that doesn't sound like him, and what's left out that he'd keep in there.

Probably, I'll be happy if Glinda doesn't cut the book short by half with her final chapter deus-ex-Storyovering. Glinda. Does nothing for me, when she appears you just know the book is going to come to a jarring halt. Still - it's neat to have seen how Baum created conflict and resolved it so peacefully every time in a different way. I think a lot about drawing out of him what other fantasists have drawn out of Prof Tolkien. I'm not strong on whimsy and humor, but I like the just, off-the-rails aspects of the world and the unabashed world building that appears. The Wheelers, he tells us, have rolling wheels for hands and feet and they're hard and rigid because they're made of the same matter as your fingernails.

In the meantime, you understand, the world continues its turning, its axis aligned against my well being, proof at last that there is a god, and that it must be defeated. That's the lesson I take from nature.