• Location: Baykonyr Crater
• Mood: productive
• Music: David Bowie, "Strangers When We Meet"

halfway sadness, dazzled by the new

Yesterday, I wrote 885 words on "The Ape's Wife," finally finding THE END. The total word count for the story comes to 8,683 words. But, fortunately, I have a very understanding editor, and he was cool with the extra 683 words. I am not yet entirely certain how I feel about the ending. This story first occurred to me as a 2-3k-word vignette for Sirenia Digest and, in the writing, became a sort of hallucinatory mini-epic of the weird. Sort of like what might have happened if Lord Dunsany had written a sequel to the 1933 King Kong. Anyway, after dinner, I did four good pages on the "Onion" screenplay, so the Zokoutu page meter looks like this:

8 / 115 (7.0%)

Which gets me almost to the end of Scene 3. Frank and Willa in their horrid little apartment above the Chinese apothecary. But. Today is a day off. Spooky finished with Murder of Angels yesterday, and I need to put some distance between myself and "The Ape's Wife" before I can determine if and how and why it might need to be tweaked. Plus, now that the short story is finished, I must proceed to the revisions of the spawn of the Forced and New Reconsolidated marches, which will likely consume most of next week.

I never did mention that I thought last Monday's episode of Heroes was somewhat less mediocre than usual, and it caused me to suspect that maybe some part of the problem is that they started the story in the wrong place.

A good walk yesterday, continuing our exploration of the parks along Ponce de Leon. We crossed Springdale and Virgilee to Oak Grove Park, which used to be Brightwood Park. It is shown as Brightwood on Olmsted's blueprints for the five parks, and I cannot imagine why the name has been changed. Except that Atlanta seems allergic to its own history. Spooky spotted a luna moth (Actias luna) chrysalis hanging in a tree. There were squirrels and robins. A very pleasant stroll. Back home, after dinner and screenplay writing, we watched Steve Anderson's hilarious documentary Fuck (2005), followed by an old favourite of mine, George Roy Hill's The Sting (1973).

Okay. I think that's all for now. I should get out of here before the dozing platypus awakens and slaps the manacles on me once again. I leave you with this image, Merian C. Cooper dreaming of Kong, which seems appropriate the day after finishing "The Ape's Wife."