blah blah determined blahNo day off yesterday. Instead, I wrote 1,025 words on The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Today, I mean to make a great push and try to reach the end of Chapter 4, though it's at least 2,000 words ahead. I panicked a little yesterday, mostly because I realized Part One of the novel will be six chapters long, after all. Which means I don't have seven chapters remaining, but eight. So, there you go.
Lots of email answered yesterday. Lately, it seems I'm saying no more often than yes. When people ask me to write a short story or a foreword or whatever. There's just so little time. It all comes down to time, and how much of it I do not have.
Yesterday, I discovered how foolish it was not to have cleaned the snow off the van right after the storm. I measured about eight inches on top of the car. Anyway, while Spooky dug out around the wheels, I scraped at the windshield. Well, mostly I dug and pried small boulders of ice loose. There were patches of ice below the snow, stuck fast to the windshield, that were the exact color of old Coca-Cola bottles. Pretty, but a bitch to get off. She went to the market. I stayed home and wrote. This is the usual way of things.
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Something that amused me a great deal, Charles Stross has compiled a collection of Amazon reader "reviews" of classics. The "reviews" are predictably wretched. But sort of funny, in a gut-wrenching way, when it's not one of my books the idiots in question are on about. For instance, from a review of The Lord of the Rings:
I can't stand this book! These fantasy things are really getting to me! I don't see how someone could read such un-true and so unbelievebly weird stuff!
Or, from a review of Catch 22: I personally don't read that many books, but this is one of the worst books I ever read. First, they're are too many characters. This book has too many characters that I can't remember even one of them in my head. They include many minor characters that nobody cares so you get confused about it. Second, it has too many mini-stories. It has lots of short stories that doesn't relate to any of the other stories and they are usually pretty boring. Third this is none sense. It doesn't have a major theme or anything and it's just talking about air force men being board of the war and just being crazy.
This is the future, and each and every moron has been given a public forum.
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Last night we had hot dogs and a halfhearted attempt at Kindernacht. We streamed four episodes of MonsterQuest, which is actually a lot worse than I'd expected. Which is probably like being disappointed by a MacDonalds' cheeseburger or a Taco Bell "chalupa."
Later, Spooky read me Kelly's Link's "Most Of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water," which was very, very good.
Please have a look at the current eBay auctions. Thank you. Now, the words must flow.
Yours in Bafflement,
Aunt Beast