I continuously devour.

• Horseman, Pass By, by Larry McMurtry. The first novel of (arguably) the greatest Texan author (maybe). It’s a very Texan book, set in north Texas, a few hours outside of Wichita Falls, on a small ranch. Beautifully written. Sad. Moving. Short, simple, sweet. It makes me think about how underplotted modern novels can be, and makes me wish I could get away with that.
• Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl. Frankl, a psychiatrist, survived the Holocaust, and used his experiences in developing a new school of psychotherapy - “logotherapy”. It centers on helping patients discover the meaning of their lives. There are occasional books that you can feel restructuring your brain, knocking down walls, rewiring neurons, changing the way you think. Almost incidentally, the author’s rich stock of referential material makes me painfully aware of the paucity of my own (state) education.
• God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens. A book-length rewrite of Russell’s “Why I Am Not a Christian”. It’s quite interesting, but the title (and the subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything) pretty much invalidate it as a tool of de-evangelism (disevangelism). The author’s weakness for glibness and invective, while not severe enough to harm his credibility, guarantee that few religionists would make it past page five. He’s essentially preaching to the people who need to hear it the least.
  But I’m still learning things. Randi and I read it aloud to each other every night before bed, like the Bible in reverse.

Next: The Travels of Marco Polo and A Concise History of the Catholic Church and eventually Roger Zelazny’s Nine Princes of Amber. I think I write more fantasy than I read, and I should correct that.

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So I had long ago intended to write a novel this fall set in Texas. It would take place both in the modern era and during the Frontier Wars of the 1870s. It would blend science fiction with horror and history. It would have a likeable protagonist and a lot to say. It would be a helluva book. Toward this end, I asked my grandfather to please ship me some books on Texas history that he thought I might find helpful. And he did, and how.

I’ve read many of those books, and enjoyed them, but my ideas have gone nowhere. I’ve elaborated them, but it’s only so much embroidery. The main idea still sits there, lifeless and uninteresting. I think I may have researched for too long. Possibly the tighter plot daunts me. I don’t do well with tight plotting. I’m more a picaresque kinda guy. And then I realized that, no, I don’t really want to write a book about Texas, I want to write another book about the medieval world. Unfortunately, I sent most of my history books home with Ben and Vivienne a month ago. Quelle drole!

I have left to me a book on the ancient Mediterranean, The Concise History of the Catholic Church, and a book of Robert Howard’s Crusader stories (most of which I’ve already read). I have a borrowed copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, recommended by two of my friends. I ordered a copy of Marco Polo’s Travels and a book on the Mongol Empire. Let’s hope this, along with the secrets that fester in my brain, will suffice for this book.

This novel will about a jongleur, a wandering minstrel in medieval Europe. He’s played in courts and he’s played in taverns; currently his fortunes are low. He’s a wit and a comic, but also wise, and with his profundity he has a measure of sadness at the depravity of the world. He loves wine, women, and song; my notes say “13th century Cyrano”. That’s a bit problematic, as Cyrano de Bergerac would be murdered even sooner in the 13th century than in the 17th. Like Cyrano, he is critical of systems of oppression: governments, religions, ideologies. Though an expert swordsman, he despairs at the wanton use of violence. He is larger-than-life, the smartest guy in the room, depending on the room. Unlike Papillon and Khatima, his flaws will not be overpowering, but just enough to give him a little flavor. Writing a likeable protagonist will be tricky for me. I’m more interested in monsters, I think.

He’ll also be a little bit Marco Polo. He’ll travel to China and meet the Khan, witnessing the destruction and generation of empires en route. Philosophically, the book will be a middle ground between my last two. Where Papillon was a questing agnostic and Khatima a virulent antitheist, my jongleur is the cheerful humanist. I’ll start in a week or two.

My article on Lost is up at RevolutionSF.

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This happened with Khatima; I was banging my head on an idea, forcing it in a wrong-shaped hole. Went back to the drawing board, chucked everything, and suddenly we have clear skies. Ideas pour forth. Everything is jim-dandy.

Also, my article on the shitfulness of Lost is up.

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Is up!

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Reading: Not actually “reading” anything, what with Lasik recovery. I have, however, listened to a few audio books. Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book was - - - very, very good. Hugo? I don’t know. I need to read Anathem before I can decide whether to validate or reject the votes of thousands of fans. But it was very good. There was little Gaimanness… Gaimanity… that weird combination of sentimentality and vagary that often annoys me about his tales, and crippled American Gods. The characters were good, it was short on cliche, and heartwarming without being cloying. Well done! And, the book was read by the author, whose reading was so good, so versatile, that I got more out of the audio book than I might have from a paper book.

Then I “read” Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky, which was originally serialized in “Boy’s Life” in the 50s. There’s a lot of talk about how great the Boy Scouts are, which I managed to ignore, and a lot of proselytizing about how great it is to be self-sufficient and never depend on the government for a handout, you goddamn welfare liberals. How… deeply ironic this is in light of the massive bailouts of the past year, all for the sake of right-wing industrialists. However, the depiction of a fledgling colony is quite interesting, and at the end there is an extremely profound segment about the nature of overpopulation that redeemed the political passages.

Playing: Just finished “Darkest of Days,” an FPS for PC. It was execrable. But my review was quite funny; it’s easier to review awful games than good ones. It’ll be up in a few days. Soon: Scribblenauts, just as soon as my eyes recover sufficiently that I can spend hours staring at two tiny squares of flashing light, and Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 (PS2 version), and - the big one for me - the PC version of Batman: Arkham Asylum. If you don’t know, this was penned by Paul Dini, who wrote the best episodes of the 90s animated series, and voiced by many of the talents of that series. It’s in the Guinness Book as the “best reviewed superhero game of all time”. Take that as you will. I’m also eager to play the PC version of the new Red Faction. Fall is always a tsunami of titles, against which one must struggle to stay afloat.

Watching: season one of The Sopranos. It justifies its reputation. I was wondering today at the quality of British TV, after watching an episode of Simon Pegg’s bizarre “Spaced”. Any government-sponsored enterprise in America gravitates to bland mediocrity, yet the BBC can produce gems like “Spaced,” a weird little show, often weird for weirdness’s sake, quite hilarious, but always unique, always being itself. The network shows of quality seem like bizarre flukes that happen when no one’s watching, like the Office, Simpsons, Veronica Mars, etc. Most quality shows are on cable, though, where they’re less worried about advertisers - HBO and Showtime especially. But in the UK, it’s government-sponsored, and it’s often daring and innovative. I could never imagine Monty Python’s Flying Circus being produced in America (never mind the inherent Britishness of it). Nothing that wildly original could survive in our market (here we all point to Arrested Development and lament).

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Here’s the story. I offer it for encouragement to those of you with bad eyes and a little extra cash, and to everyone else as a horrific cautionary tale of the limits of mortal man’s technology. Haha, just kidding. As you will see, there are no limits. We can do anything.

I went in Saturday afternoon to the place in Gwangju. They basically gave me all the same tests over again, but with slightly better English; so my corneal sickness was revealed to be corneal thickness, which is much less worrying. The doctor told me exactly how the surgery would work: the Da Vinci laser (he was ahead of his time) would first cut a corneal flap, a very shallow 3/4 circle around the orbit of my iris. They would then lift this, exposing the cornea, the important part, and then blast that with the Excimer laser for about ten seconds. I thought Excimer was a pretty cool name for a laser, and was comforted by that fact. This laser does the actual work; it shaves micrometers (that is, millionths of a meter) from the cornea, reshaping it into a more perfect lens. The science behind this is, frankly, amazing. The laser tracks eye position 4000 times per second, and adjusts accordingly. The doctor can control it on the nano scale.

Alternately, the doctor said, they could just pluck out my organic eyes (or “meat eyes,” as he kept calling them) entirely, and replace the whole affair, down to the nerve level, with a top-of-the-line cybernetic imaging system. This would have a higher cost, both in money and humanity, but would enable me to see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectra - but not the gamma spectrum, so I decided against it.

Then I waited, and waited, and waited some more, and then they finally slapped me in a hospital gown and led me into the “blasting chamber”. There was a bench, which I approached with some reluctance, over which was an arch with all sorts of lights poking from the bottom - the Excimer array. I laid down, stared up into the straight-from-a-UFO array of lights over my head, and started to get nervous. They put a speculum over my eye, cranked the lid open, flushed it with some solution, and went to work.

First, says the doctor, look at the green light. Absolutely do not look away. Watch the green light. If it disappears, keep watching where the green light was. Do not look away. “Or you’ll go blind” was implicit, but I knew what he meant. Machines hummed, and the doctor and a cadre of assistants were all cheerfully telling me not to move, in chorus, for about ten minutes. It was hell. I wanted to kick machinery and nurses, but I didn’t dare move. I wanted to scream. I just clenched and unclenched my fists and said, “Mmmf”. We had almost started.

The doctor finished his measurements, then swung out a plastic arm from the array that locked directly over my eye. This was the Da Vinci laser. They switched it on; orange light flared out and eclipsed my vision, then a black void grew from the center of the orange light. It was like I was being forced into another dimension, which at that point I welcomed. My eyeballs were numbed, but I swear I could feel it cutting, like a pencil dragging lightly across my eye. Enough to alarm me.

Then the doctor lifted the flap, “with spatula,” he said, and there I was with my eye cut open. Everything became very blurry. I could tell that there were still lights above me, but no shapes and few colors. It was surreal in the extreme. They swung the Da Vinci laser away and spooled up the Excimer.

You know when you’re at the dentist, and they keep rinsing your mouth or whatever, and you want nothing more than to close it? This was like that, except the penalty for closing is lifelong blindness. (I think.) It was extremely uncomfortable. From the green dot, at which I had been staring as if my life depended on it, a halo of red light expanded, expanded, covered my entire field of vision, brighter and brighter. It was evaporating my corneal cells. I swear I could feel pain. This was mostly in my head, I’m sure, but I could feel it, faint and distant, as if my eyeball were in another room, but I could feel enough to get worried. Then it was over, and the doctor was replacing the cornea flap and smoothing it with the spatula, which was a very strange thing to see through my numbed eyeball. Like someone mopping the other side of a pane of glass.

The doctor told me they were going to put a protective contact lens on, and I said with a sort of delirious happiness, “Do it! [And be damned, you!]” I’ve never been able to put on contacts with anything short of hellacious difficulty, but with my eye screwed open, it was the easiest thing I did all day. I had a good laugh about this, in my head. No one would have understood it anyway. Then there was a sharp pang as they released the speculum; normally they attach it to your eyelashes, but mine are so long and sensual that they just pinched a good chunk of eyelid instead. I exhaled for the first time in four minutes, and the doctor said, “Okay, now the other one.”

I’ll spare you that account - like the first, but worse, as that cornea is thicker and needed extra lasering. We rode home with a Korean family who happened to be at the clinic that day and lived in the same city as us. I felt fine at first. My vision was already better, I could tell, though quite blurry through the thick protective lenses.

On the way home, the numbing drops wore off, and I began to enjoy intense pains. I came up with two analogies for this exquisite sensation; at time it felt like ice picks plunged into my eyes, at other times as if my optic nerves had been rewired to carry not nervous electrical impulses, but red-hot magma. All I could do was rub my temples and rock back and forth. Randi did me a world of good by squeezing my hand. (Seriously. It’s remarkable what such a simple gesture will do when you’re suffering. I must remember this for my further interactions with hoo-mans.) When I got home, all I could do for the rest of the night was pace in the dark while listening to an audiobook of Roald Dahl short stories. Within four hours of the surgery, though, the pain had subsided, and when I woke the next day, it was gone completely.

So was my-opia. Things were a bit blurry from the lenses, but I knew there was a significant improvement. But I couldn’t imagine how significant. In the pre-surgery form, they tell you that they’re shooting for 20/40. When I went to the doctor for my follow-up exam, he told me that I now had better than 20/20.

Previously, with my glasses, I couldn’t make out facial features on the other side of my classroom. Now I can make them out on the other side of the cafeteria. When I looked out the window, I would see a leaf-textured tree shape; now I can see the individual leaves. I can look across the rooftops and see where the old women have spread out red peppers to dry, and see the individual peppers rather than a red mass. I can see not only individual bricks rather than brick-colored buildings, but I can see the rough textures of the bricks. I can see the pebbles on the playground rather than just dirt.

There’s still some eye strain when I try to see stuff within arm’s reach, so I can’t yet read books, which sucks. I can watch TV and play PS2, but not PC games, because they’re closer. When I’m looking at something close and then look at something distant, there’s a moment of weirdness as my eyes refocus. Otherwise, I have absolutely no side effects. It was an unqualified success. I am well pleased.

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In the comments on the facebook repost of my Dan Brown post, Joel mentioned the Deus Ex games, which had slipped my mind. They were actually my first introduction to the Illuminati. They take place in a crumbling near-future, where world governments have become more brutal but less effective, plague is rampant, technology is out of control, and shadowy organizations preside over this chaotic world-mess. The plot is extremely well executed, and the world can be explored in the sort of depth that you only find in video games.

You can probably find them for under $10 in any bargain bin, and they’re old enough that they’ll run on most computers. Recommended!

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No posts for a few days; in a few hours, I’ll be staring down the barrel of a gigalaser, its billion watts focusing a wavefront-guided beam directly into my lookin’ orbs, there to sizzle off micrometers of my cornea, evaporating those cells that I grew so carefully. Days of recovery to follow. But my new powers will be more than worth it.

As you may know, I have a striking horror of ever being bored, even for one minute, lest the dementing phantasms in my head rampage freely through my forebrain. Unfortunately, while recovering, I won’t be able to engage in most of my favorite pastimes: video games, reading, television, painstakingly restoring the lesser works of Titian and Caravaggio - all these require the use of my eyes. I can still play guitar, but that’ll only last so long. So I’ve turned to audio books.

Some of you (Ali) are big fans, but I never have been. My parents consume them on road trips. But I’ve never been able to get into it. Part of me not only loves but demands a physical paper-and-glue volume in my hands, and the other part of me knows that often my attention can wander, and I’ll need to reread passages should I become distracted by thoughts of sex, geopolitics, sex, astrophysics, sex, other books, hagiography, sex, and sex.

So I got some audio books that I hope will be fairly unchallenging. I specifically avoided downloading Perdido Street Station; as eager as I am to read more Mieville, his works are very much dependent on being in paper. In Iron Council, he created a sort of ebb and flow with dialogue, almost lapsing into whatsit, “concrete poetry”, at times. So none of that. I concentrated on simple, straightforward stuff that should retain its quality regardless of medium.

• Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. It won the Hugo, you know. I feel like I should keep reading Gaiman until I find something I like. I’ve read some of his stuff that’s pretty good, and some that was very good, but nothing that blew my mind, nothing that changed the way I think about fiction. That is the bar, Mr. Gaiman! I feel fair setting it so high because of his incredible popularity. I demand he shatter my paradigm.
• Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. It’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - IN SPACE! How could this be less than awesome? Asimov is the greatest scifi author I’ve never read. He has a reputation for poor characterization, especially with female characters, and stilted dialogue.
• Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky. I guess he’d be the opposite of Asimov - great characters, and rich, ornate, perhaps overwritten dialogue. It sounds like nothing any human might ever say, but it’s a delight to read.
  This is one of his juvenile books, which, as I’ve often said, are usually better than his stuff for adults, before he became self-indulgent and polemical.
• A number of Roald Dahl short stories. One of the pillars of my childhood. His shorts for adults are even better.

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When I was showering this morning, I was reminded of a discussion on Dan Brown I had with a friend last weekend. I was reminded of this discussion in the shower because, in the original discussion, I said that I had been trapped in a bathroom for a long summer afternoon with only a family member’s copy of Da Vinci Code to read, and I ended up reading shampoo bottles. Dear writers: if you cannot compete with shampoo bottles, please consider a new line of work. (Mr. Brown has an excellent back-up career as a singer/songwriter if he wants it.)

The Brown fans that I talk to seem to enjoy most of all the conspiracy theory elements, the Templars and the vast centuries-old schemes of the Catholic Church and the Illuminatus and so forth. Indeed, that stuff is fun. But Dan Brown did not invent it. I would go so far as to describe his rendition of these elements as “watered down”. There is a vast and thriving subgenre of conspiracy theory fiction, and it’s decades old. Here are a few recommendations, so you can see where Dan Brown probably got his ideas.

The Illuminatus! trilogy is the grandfather of conspiracy fiction. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson were two junior editors at Playboy in the late 60s, in charge of sifting the letters to the editor and weeding out all the crazy conspiracy-nut stuff. After a while, they began to notice a web of connections between the various theories in the letters, and decided that it would make a great novel. So they co-wrote the trilogy.

These books are stuffed with every conspiracy theory you could think of, and they make it work. UFOs, the Mafia, the assassination of Dutch Schultz and his famous deathbed logorrhea, Atlantis, the Gaia hypothesis, the Hashashiyyin, the Templars, Cthulhu, and, of course, the Illuminati themselves. The book plays with the nature of the narrative, occasionally becoming a book about itself, and often feeding the reader completely conflicting sets of information. It’s a challenge and a joy to read. As a novel - as a traditional work of rising action-climax-denouement - it is flawed, but as a time capsule of the spirit of the late 60s, the political chaos and energy of the time, and as a mind-fuck, it is unmatched. This is one of the few books that changed the way I saw the world - though not in a conspiracy-nut way. The writers are aware that all their theories are just fiction, so they use the book to discuss the real, relevant issues in which they’re interested, namely the merits of socialism and anarchy. It’s a deeply interesting social discourse in the guise of an insane (sort of) adventure story. It’ll blow your mind, several times, in the first book alone.

You can find the books in this original printing, where you can set all the covers next to each other for a neat triptych, or you can get it in a single-volume omnibus.
Shea and Wilson, sadly, never went on to anything as interesting as these books. Shea, bizarrely, became a somewhat melodramatic author of otherwise excellent historical fiction (almost all out of print now, but I’ve read it all and love it), and Wilson became heavily involved with the psychedelic movement, became good friends with Timothy Leary, and wrote a lot about how we should all do peyote. In fiction, though, most of his later stuff just cannibalized the original trilogy. Skip that. Get this. Read it. These books are like the Beatles of conspiracy fiction; they synthesized everything that came before and influenced everything that came after.

Next is Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum. Like everything else by Eco, it’s hyperliterate and much smarter than you and me. But don’t let the author’s THIRTY-TWO PhDs intimidate you. At its core, it’s an excellent novel of character, with a few thriller elements to keep it interesting. The plot is basically the real story of the Illuminatus trilogy: a few editors in charge of sifting submissions decide to put together all the crazy stuff they get and make a novel. But soon they find their fiction has taken on a life of its own, as others believe so passionately in what they have created that, in pursuing it, they create it. It’s a conspiracy novel that comments intelligently on other conspiracy novels, but it also has moments of incredible beauty. Eco’s interest is intertextuality, how books relate to other books and how the reader influences that relationship - as you may know if you read The Name of the Rose. This book is even more passionate about the relationship of literature to history to humanity.

And, yes, it has Templars in it; also the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, the Illuminati (of course), the Count Saint-Germain, Cagliastro, Roger Bacon, and kabbalism. Whatta book.

Of course, there’s a lot more to the subgenre. It lacks the pseudo-historical elements of the last two books, but one of the earliest works in the genre is John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, a thrilling little book about prewar German spies in England. There’s also Richard Condon’s classic The Manchurian Candidate, and Jorge Luis Borges’s (freaking awesome) Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. (Everyone can do with more JLB.) Iain Banks’ The Business and Tim Powers’s Dare are both supposed to be quite good, and conspiracies are all over the place in Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson.

If you’d like to know more about the Templars, get a history and learn for yourself how they can still be fascinating, even if they were quite mundane. They didn’t guard the Holy Grail or worship Mahound or Bahamut, no, but they were an incredibly powerful, wealthy organization in a land rife with intrigue. I recommend Piers Paul Read’s The Templars; it also provides good background on the Crusades. It’s a bit dry, but 100% bullshit-free, an important distinction to make when researching this group. So much has been written on them, and so much of it blatant conspiracy-mongering taken as fact. You don’t want to get sucked into that.

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My review is up!

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Let us dissect the appeal of zombie fiction! It’s more popular now than ever, and while I enjoy a good zombie flick, I don’t really like the subgenre enough to, say, read a novel about the zombie war. I think part of the problem is that eventually many zombie stories end up the same; the scenario can only have so many outcomes. (Historically, that’s global zombification.) Another part is that zombies, by nature, are bereft of identity, so they make poor characters. More often they serve as mirrors of the human survivors, surfaces for them to see their own faults or strengths. That’s fine, when it works, but I prefer to have villains a little more developed than that.

First, I must point out that Ron Kirkman’s The Walking Dead is the finest work of zombie fiction ever, bar none. Go to hell, Romero! Kirkman’s got you beat. (Holy crap, AMC is turning it into a TV series!)

So, my theories as to the appeal of zombie fiction:

• Violence fantasy. Zombies are evil things, and no one would blame you for shooting one. Like coyotes back in the ranching days! Killing a zombie is almost as good as killing a human, but you don’t get in trouble. I read The Zombie Survival Guide, and it’s all about the different ways to kill a zombie. Dead Rising for the Xbox is known for providing many diverse improvised weapons with which you can kill zombies. Whether the violence fantasy is indulged for its own sake (as in the awful, awful Dawn of the Dead remake) or as an elegant metaphor on how much we like violence fantasies (Romero’s stuff), there is no doubt that people enjoy watching the living dead getting machine-gunned.
• Survivalist fantasy. This, I think, is the category where The Walking Dead falls. And this is a conversation I’ve had many times:
  Jens: “Zombies attack. What do we do?”
  Joel: “Go to the Wal-mart. Empty the gun displays and stock up on dry goods and purified water.”
  Jens: “Drive out to the ranch. Build barbed-wire fences around the perimeter.”
  Joel: “Good idea. Geographic isolation would keep us safe.”
  Jens: “Plant crops. Supplement agriculture with hunting.”
  Joel: “But we’d have to deploy regular patrols to maintain the perimeter, look for holes in the fence where zombies can get through.”
  Jens: “Not just zombies - after a while, we’d have to deal with raiders.”
  Joel: “I know they’re a staple of any post-apocalypse, but I’m a little less excited about killing actual humans.”
  Jens: “Yes, but you must, to keep your people safe.”
  Joel: “I know. I’m ready.”

  We’ve never had this conversation in a non-zombie context. But we could just as easily discuss the finer points of foraging in a wild area, the necessities of building a shelter - basic wilderness survival. But it’s not interesting without zombies. When civilization inevitably breaks down, will you survive? Do you have the skills and the emotional fortitude to keep going in the face of insurmountable existential horror? Or do you shoot yourself with your last bullet? It’s fun to watch these questions play out in a fictional context. Less fun in a nonfictional context.

Only two bullet points? There’s gotta be more to it than that. What do YOU think, dear readers?

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How are we to define our lives and our identities in a world that strives so ardently to destroy meaning? Since the era of Socrates and his colleagues, we have sought a better understanding of who we are, why we are here, and what to do with ourselves in the short time allotted us. Sometimes we find fulfillment in ascetic lifestyles, artistic creation, or charitable works. Sometimes we watch “Dancing with the Stars”.

But DwtS is so much more than a way to sedate ourselves until death. It is not a neutral pastime. It is a force of negativity, a sort of active stupidity that actually destroys meaning around it. With every episode that airs, a book disappears. Pliny’s Studiosus, Aristotle’s On Comedy - gone the way of the dodo.

DwtS is on my mind because I just learned that Tom Freaking DeLay, of all people, will appear on this season. I think the intersection of people who watch DwtS and people who know who Tom Delay is would be rather small, but the network execs think otherwise. I try to maintain a level of objectivity regarding the plight of the world; if you feel empathy for every, say, soldier suicide-bombed or every AIDS-baby born, you would quickly lose functionality as a human being. But this - this fills me with a deep sort of despair for the state of humanity. It is nothing, it is a trifle, it will soon be forgotten by the populace’s over-stimulated brains - but in the meantime they will watch the hell out of it.

In The Satanic Verses, there is a nightmare sequence wherein a character imagines hordes of young Muslims marching happily into a monstrous mullah’s chewing maw, a profoundly disturbing allegory for the way fundamentalism can consume lives, literally and figuratively. I will appropriate the image. The maw is ABC. The young mujaheddin are we, the viewers.

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Yes, I was fairly drunk last night. I don’t know what I was typing about.

I’m writing notes for my next novel. I may start next week. You can’t wait to read it!

In other news, I’ve found that Twitter is a good venue for utterly random abuse.

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How unimportant!

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