Tell me how you really feel, Min

I was standing between the bed and the dresser this morning, getting ready for work. Min laid on the end of the bed just behind me. I had my back to her while I put on my rings and my watch, and the radio started playing something groovetastic. So I started dancing along with it—shaking it like a white girl, to paraphrase the old funk song.

I finished up and turned around. Min stared at me all bug-eyed. "Wow," she said, "that was really disturbing."

That's what I love about cats. They really know how to realign your self-image.

Koan brothers

Random quote of the day:


"When an ordinary man attains knowledge he is a sage: when a sage attains understanding he is an ordinary man."

—Zen koan




( Illustrated visionary. )

Cut that out

I'm at that part of the rewrite (midpoint) where I wonder why I ever fooled myself into thinking I had even an inkling of talent, wherein everything I reread seems like the grossest dross, and every character a cardboard mockup of a human being. I'll get over myself. Middles are supposed to make you despair, I think, both in the writing and the rewriting. It's a Universal Rule.

I'm also experiencing that wiggily sensation of realizing I have to cut some more characters. It always feels like a betrayal when I deny one of them their time in the sun. I become far too attached, frankly.

I'll be reluctantly cutting back the role of Tansy, the tough chick warrior, although she's enormous fun to write. I've come to accept that her tough chick action is seriously interfering with the tough chick action of my main character, Carsten.

In the world there's room for plenty of tough chicks. But fiction is not the world. Unless it's polemical fiction, and I don’t wish to go there. (And, really, that's not the world, either, just some somebody's idea of How Things Should Be or their simplistic notions of How Things Are.)

So Tansy won't be disappearing entirely (and may have a greater role in one of the other books in this series), but I'm not going to be using her as tough chick window dressing in this book. That's a disservice to the story, as well as to Tansy herself.

What a not-world, what a not-world. All my lovely tough chickness!