Yesterday I wrote 1,166 words. And, as good news goes, that's not so bad. For the moment, I have shelved both The Dinosaurs of Mars and "The Ape's Wife," and I'm writing this piece for Sirenia Digest 17. For now, I'm calling it "Grey Lady of the Red Quarters," but the title is likely to change. After all those weeks of not-writing, I finally decided I needed the comfort of familiar ground and familiar faces to get things moving again, so this is a "Yellow House" story — though it does not actually take place in the shunned Yellow House on Benefit Street. Rather, it occurs in the changelings' safe haven on Federal Hill, which I first introduced in "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ghoul" (Sirenia Digest 9). The story is set in 1999, and is sort of a sequel to "So Runs the World Away." So far, the cast includes Scarborough Pentecost, Patience Bacon, Saben White, and that nebish Josiah Kennedy, who was only mentioned in passing in Daughter of Hounds. The Bailiff has been mentioned, and others will soon make their presence known. This will be no vignette, but a full-blown short story, providing a further peek into the lives of the changelings.

And today, the air in the house is not so filled with piano wire. And last night, I slept a full eight hours for the first time in weeks.

Also, I would like to note that today is the third anniversary of this LJ, which was started as a mirror to the now-defunct (but still archived) Blogger journal. In these three years, I have made 1,326 entries to this LiveJournal. There have been 15,644 reader comments. That's a lot of words (and my how the world around me and within me has changed in those three short years!). Of course, this is only a fraction of my online journal. The rest is still at Blogger (November 2001-December 2006; note the overlap) and may be reached by following this link.

Not much else to be said for yesterday. Not much else that needs saying. Last night, while Spooky worked on her Dreaming Squid Dollworks MySpace page, I watched a documentary on Europa from August 1st (that is, about Europa, not filmed on Europa, alas), which I missed when it first aired because we were in Rhode Island. About nine p.m., I got back to work on my own MySpace page. Mostly on the photo gallery, where 55 images are now stored. I'm trying to get photos uploaded spanning the years from 1993 to the present, the full length of my writing career thus far. This is mostly something I'm doing for me, but anyone is welcome to take a look. Comments are also not unwelcome. Right now, I still need a photo from 1993 and a few from 1995 (those were years with little photography) and there's still a gap from July 2000 to September 2002. At the very least, I've chronicled my ever-changing hair colour.

By 11:30 p.m., I'd had enough of MySpace and the unnamed iMac and went to bed. We're taking a break from Lemony Snicket, and so Spooky read to me from Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. And she read this:

"You know what I say to people when I hear they're writing anti-war books?"

"No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?"

"I say, 'Why don't you write a book an anti-glacier book instead?'"

What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers.

And I interrupted her at this point and said, "But you know, we have stopped the glaciers, haven't we." I was not meaning to imply that I think that wars can ever be stopped. I don't. Too many people make too much money off war for them to ever begin to recede the way human activity is pulling back the glaciers. If only there were as much money to be made off all those melting glaciers, money and machismo and false security, maybe there'd be hope that the warring might end someday.

Now, it's time to see a woman about a platypus...