Reading:

• The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler. I’ve been reading his blog (the aptly titled “Clusterfuck Nation”) for several years, and even read his novel, World Made by Hand; this is the book where he lays out his ideas for the future, and how the problems of peak oil, compounded by global warming and geopolitics and the collapse of petroagriculture and the super-economy, are going to dramatically affect our way of life. Where Kunstler is normally quite polemic on his blog, he reins it in for this book; you can tell he believes in the importance of his message.
  As for the actual content, Kunstler’s knowledge of the subject matter is near encyclopedic, and his analytical ability is quite impressive; he does tend toward doom and gloom - but, again, not nearly as much as on his blog - with some predictions seeming a bit too apocalyptic, such as the US splintering into several countries within my lifetime. One takes the book with a grain of salt. That said, most of his facts check out, and his assertions seem accurate. It makes me want to move to Oregon. It’s a book everyone should read; even if his worst assertions never come to pass, it forces you to reconsider your place in this country and this country’s place in the world.
• The Martians, by Kim Stanley Robinson. A collection of short stories that fill in some blanks of the Mars trilogy. I’ve said several times that the original trilogy is one of the best things I’ve ever read, regardless of genre, and this is a welcome return to this world. Only two stories in, and I am stunned on every page at Robinson’s intelligence, his unsurpassed grasp of character, his psychological depth, the beauty of the worlds he creates.
• In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote (on audiobook). The famous “nonfiction novel” of the 1959 slaying of a family of four in a small Kansas town. Its alleged inaccuracies aside, the book gives a bone-deep portrait of the killers and their victims, crawling into their heads and raking over every detail of their pasts, so that their tragedy becomes your tragedy; Capote’s eye for detail and character is amazing.
• Nickel and Dimed: on Not Getting by in America, by Barbara Ehrenreich. A middle-class Harper’s writer “goes undercover” for a year, working the worst kind of blue-collar jobs and bringing back her experiences to share with us, the monocle-wearing cognac-sippers. Haha. It’s actually not condescending at all. It fills me with intense horror at the kind of jobs I used to work, but had forgotten about. I hope three years of sinecures followed by a year of unemployment don’t wreck me completely. Good god, our society is so rich, the richest that has ever existed in history, and still so few people barely scrape by, and many of us in the middle class still find time to feel sorry for ourselves. Go to Cambodia, you jerks, and see what real poverty looks like.
• Next: Homicide, by David Simon, Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson… etc etc ad nauseum.

Playing:

• Assassin’s Creed II. So good. I’ve never played a sequel so improved. The first game was all right, it had some good ideas and some amazing design, but they had no idea what to do with it, leading to the tragedy of having big, detailed worlds with nothing to do. The story also got a little drunk on its own importance from time to time. The second game has a better script, a better story, amazing levels, delightful gameplay, varied and interesting missions, and tons to do. Bring on the third. And set it in outer space or something. Just kidding. Set it in Arlington, Texas! Just kidding. That would be horrible. People would ask, why did Ubisoft spend millions of dollars building this suburban wasteland? For that matter, why did Arlingtonians? Ha ha! We live in a car-dominated void utterly bereft of community or beauty! Ha! Seriously, though. The games are unique for bringing to life the world’s great cities, the unique locations that humanity has raised into history, so it is amusing to imagine our horrible cities receiving that same treatment. You have Florence and Venice, havens for and repositories of art and genius and the spirit of human inventiveness, and then you have Arlington, which has more fast food chains per capita than any other city in the world.
• Bioshock 2. It would raise nerd ire to assert that this game is far superior to the first, if anyone really cared that much. But, dammit, it is. The story is better. The gameplay is more polished. The moral decisions are more complex and interesting. Everything is better. It only lacks the originality of the original, for obvious reasons.

Watching:

• Season 3 of Breaking Bad. This show matures, getting more complex and richer with age. The third season is even more rewarding than the second, which stands as one of the greatest narratives ever told in the medium of TV. Best show on the air right now.
• Season 5/32 of Doctor Who. No one knows about Matt Smith yet, but I think Steven Moffat is doing a good job of running the series. So far we’ve had a handful of great episodes, some pretty good ones, and one or two clunkers - but it’s always been fun.
• I still have to watch the finale of Lost. Can’t wait to be done with this show forever, and to exorcise my bile by writing a vicious retrospective for RevolutionSF.

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“Hello,” said Jens, to the earnest young clerk at the Super Target, where he had no choice but to be. “I regret that I must register a complaint.”

“Uh?” the bright young go-getting clerk said.

“The sign advertising this display of bathing suits says, ‘More fun. Less rays.’ I’m sure you know that, since ‘rays’ can be described discretely, the sign should read, ‘More fun. Fewer rays.’”

“Oh.”

“Perhaps you would like to notify the management, to avoid embarrassment in the future,” said Jens.

“No problem,” said Jens.

“I think your haircut has gone all the way to your brain,” said Randi.

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I didn’t get much work done today, because this morning my mind exploded with possibilities.

Tobias Buckell’s blog is in my morning RSS diet (even though I don’t like his books very much), so I read his latest entry, about an attack piece from Publisher’s Weekly on JA Konrath. Who’s that? Some writer. Never heard of him. But he’s the kind of guy you should know about, because he’s making almost $500 a day selling self-published e-books online.

I spent the morning reading through his supremely encouraging blog and got his story: he spent forever breaking into traditional publishing, amassing over 500 rejections, writing and rewriting many many novels before he finally got published. His initial sales were okay, and then worse than okay, until, as happens to too many writers, publishers started passing. Not wanting his books to go to waste, he stuck ‘em online, sold ‘em on Amazon for the Kindle at low, low prices. And now he’s rolling in dough.

He’s often described as an outlier by other novelists and publishers, something that not everyone can do, and, yeah, that’s true. Your book needs to  be good. It needs to have an eye-catching cover, and you need to work to promote it. He also prices his books incredibly cheaply. Many ebooks produced by major companies sell, incredibly, in the $6-12 range. JA Konrath prices his at $2-3 and makes up for it with volume - volume and the amazing 70% royalties Amazon pays.

Think about that. 70%. Most traditional publishers pay the author a criminal 15% - granted, 15% of $20 or so. But $2 is the “Well, why not?” range. More people are likely to try your stuff, and advertise through word of mouth. If it’s good, of course.

Another criticism against Konrath is that he already had a fanbase before he tried e-publishing, so he didn’t have to get noticed amongst the sea of dreck. Maybe. Certainly that wouldn’t hurt. But here on his blog he talks to Karen McQuestion (great name); she began with no prior publications, no website, nothing, and in nine months sold 30,000 ebooks. Damn.

It’s no secret to anyone who’s spent any time looking at the procedure of getting published traditionally that the traditional system is decrepit, obsolete, slow, and maddeningly unfair. My novel has been stuck in slush for sixteen months now. It passed the first round, quite quickly, and went on to round two, where it would take “quite a while” to make a decision. Sixteen months and counting. No one has this kind of time, but publishers think nothing of sticking someone’s work in a stack and ignoring it for a couple of years. Oh, and don’t you dare submit anywhere else at the same time - that wouldn’t be fair to the publisher. Jesus.

And then, if I were lucky enough to get accepted, I could wait another year or two for editing, layout, printing, and finally distribution, when it fits into their schedule. And then I’d be on my way to 15% royalties. Great. In my recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I noted how few of my favorite authors had books on the shelves - which are physically limited, after all - and how much dreck was on the shelves with them, and how was good stuff supposed to stand out?

Currently e-books only represent 6% of all book sales. But, as Konrath points out, the e-reader market is nowhere near saturation. Lots of people are buying ipads, iphones, etc. etc. Many markets, many illimitable electronic bookshelves to fill.

Konrath actually gives away his books for free on his webpage. He encourages piracy (good publicity). No DRM on his stuff. Spread the word, spread your books.

It’s powerful, it’s democratic, it’s good news for authors. It may be the actualization of POD. Print-on-demand, of course, is rarely ever profitable because you still have to put the books on paper. Yes, it’s democratic, anyone can do it, but the cost of physically printing the books put them into a prohibitive range for many people - who wants to pay $25 for a poorly printed paperback? $2 for a digital, though - well, why not?

Workers control the means of production!

More:

Some writers view this as a means to an end. Boyd Morrison’s books did so well on Kindle that Simon & Schuster offered him a deal, and now he’s a “real” author. John Scalzi gave away “Old Man’s War” for free on his website for years, until it got enough buzz for Tor to pick up; now all his books are published traditionally. He says he wouldn’t advise the giving-away-for-free method as a way to break in. He also came out against self-publishing in an amusing and long blog post that I can’t be bothered to look up right now - basically, you self-pub, you hire your own editor and artist, spend a lot of time on marketing and junk that your agent is supposed to do for you, so much time that you can’t write on your own. Nice. Great. Yes, that’s true, if you’re a freaking professional author already. For those of for whom writing, sadly, is a side gig, for those of us whom the agents reject (if they even bother to answer letters), we’ve already got stacks of books doing nothing, being read by no one at any price. Why not? Well, why not?

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Jens and Randi went to Super Target. They had to.

“Excuse me,” Jens said to the snack counter girl at the snack counter by the entrance. “I’d like an Icee. No. I want a Rice Krispie treat, an M&M cookie, a cheese pretzel, and a brownie, extra icing, all blended together in a blender. And for the solvent, America’s favorite beverage, Coca-Cola.”

“We have Pepsi,” said the snack counter girl.

“Disgusting! Just give me an Icee.”

To the helpful-seeming clerk, Jens said, “Excuse me. I’m looking for a cafetière à piston.”

“A what?”

“I don’t think everyone knows what that means,” said Randi.

“I’m sorry. I’m looking for a cafetière à piston kinda thing,” Jens said.

“He means a French press,” Randi said.

“Oh,” said the clerk, “they’re right over - ”

“Never mind, I found them,” Jens said. “Now, where are your shoes for straight men?”

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From an interview on Strange Horizons:

LJ: Where do you see space exploration going in the next 50-75 years? From all that has been found out recently about planets like Mars—and now the research interest in Pluto—do you think our exploration of space can possibly help us deal with the environmental crises on Earth?

KSR: Well, comparative planetology is a powerful tool for investigating how Earth’s biosphere behaves, so going to Mars and studying it would be a great thing to do. Even if most of the big lessons from comparative planetology are already learned (if not applied to Earth yet), still the news of people on Mars would emphasize every day that we too live on a planet, finite and capable of crashing ecologically. So space exploration still has a defensible place among the human projects, I think. None of it is going to go very fast, but that’s okay too. It would mean that significant space travel would be occurring in the context of a healthy global culture.

Yes….

And then:

LJ: What are your views on globalization and the so-called global village?

KSR: Globalization seems to be one name for late capitalism’s enmeshing of every culture on Earth, and the biosphere itself, into its system of strip-mining for short-term gain. I think globalization should be understood to be a malignant process, like a social cancer.

The “global village” on the other hand strikes me as real, for the fraction of the world’s population that has access to the global media, and potentially very good for world history. Not everyone is in the village, but it may be a really big fraction; and maybe almost everyone is aware of the rest of the world, more or less fully. It’s an information cascade that has touched everyone not living in isolation. That awareness of everyone else on the planet can very easily lead to the conclusion “we’re all in this together,” which while frightening for the currently privileged to contemplate, may yet be a spur to action by all, and to a general support of justice applied worldwide. Permaculture as the global project of the global village; as opposed to globalization, which is a kind of Taylorization of all humanity.

Oi. This guy gets it. I’m remembering from the Mars trilogy how he describes that humanity (in a few hundred years) has ample resources and incredible command over the natural world, and now they can begin the real work of humanity: building a decent society.

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I was looking at a photo gallery from the recent Nebula awards, and the appearance of Eugie Foster, an Asian-American, suddenly threw the utter whiteness of everyone else into sharp relief. Wow.

I’ve read before that scifi is generally considered a white man’s genre, and while I won’t speculate on why that is, because I’m busy, dammit, the numbers certainly bear it out. A clear majority of the authors in these photos are white men and women, with two non-whites: Eugie Foster and Saladin Ahmed. (Unless I missed anyone.) This isn’t remotely representative of America’s population.

Let’s see. Part of the under-representation of minorities might be merely ignorance on my part. I can name two African-American authors - Samuel R. Delaney and Octavia Butler - one Asian-American - Eugie Foster - and absolutely zero Latino-Americans.

(Fortunately, women have made significant headway in the genre - the pictures of this year’s Nebulas have many more females than they would have thirty, forty years ago.)

Like pretty much everything else, science fiction would benefit from diversity. We need more kinds of stories told. More experiences. More variety.

It may not be as bad as all that. A quick google search might help me discover more authors of various races. But my internet connection is shit. So I’ll do that later. I did buy a paperback containing three Octavia Butler novels, and I look forward to reading it. I also bought Delaney’s The Einstein Intersection; here’s hoping it’s readable. I wanted to like Stars in My Pocket so much…

Expansion: Of course this is a well known problem in genre literature. I’m only noting it today because I was looking at the Nebula pictures this morning and it came to mind. The problem has been well discussed before.

Kind of tangentially, Kim Stanley Robinson in an interview once said that “science fiction is the appropriate genre for the US”. He also mentions that Latin America and Asia do magic realism much better than North America, postulating that magic realism is a “way to speak about Latin America”. Scifi is appropriate for the US, magic realism for Latin America, high fantasy for mid-war Britannia. Okay. Why is scifi appropriate for North America? It’s progressive, it’s rational, it’s in love with the future and the same attitude of inevitable human progress that has defined America since World War II. One could note that this defines White America; unfortunately, many of the minorities in America have been historically left out of that grand futurism of the fifties to seventies that we used to think would lead inevitably to Star Trek fantasies. The experience of Asian, African, and Latin Americans in those decades was quite different.

This doesn’t mean that there’s not room for those cultures to participate in science fiction, only that it needs to grow away from its middle class white male roots. Maybe the growing dominance of Asian Americans in our technical fields will lead to more authors from those genres. But then you can view it as a microcosm, that the problem with diversity in scifi is a problem with diversity in America overall.

Expanded expansion: Alex wondered in the comments if there’s much pressure on minority writers to write “minority” fiction, even when it’s genre fiction; whether they’re pressured to “represent” their minority, or if the publishers may try to market their books accordingly. I don’t know. Might be able to find out by poking around on the internet or, you know, talking to some minority writers. I know I’m always under pressure to chronicle the novelty of the white male experience.

But seriously. I find myself taking pains to include in my books female characters and characters of multiple races. This is not some kind of tokenism or because I’m bored of imagining white guys all the time, but an effort to bring diverse points of view into the narrative. Of course we must remember that it is not only our cultural backgrounds that make us diverse, but also our individuality, viz., we are much more than our race. China Mieville, who is good at so many things, is quite good at representing diverse cultures in a fantasy world, with such depth that it reflects our integration of multiple cultures in our own world.

Expanded expansion of the expansion: Alex, like KSR, mentions magical realism by way of Sherman Alexie. I love magical realism - though I’ve only read Jorge Luis Borges and Salman Rushdie - and while on its own, in its native context, it is an original creation, I view its acceptance by the academia and mainstream of North America as the final triumph of speculative fiction over people who have no more ideas. It is one thing to originate magical realism or be part of a culture that does so, and consider it on its own terms; however, when you turn up your nose at comic books or fantasy or science fiction as being “unreal”, and then embrace a book where, say, a British Indian actor becomes the avatar of the devil on Earth, and a woman psychically/mystically commands butterflies, then you, sir, are an ass. I am delighted to see Borges and Garcia Marquez taught in the universities, and can’t wait for them to be supplemented by Gene Wolfe and Harlan Ellison and Lois McMaster Bujold.

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Sometimes thunderbolts, the kind that come out of a clear blue sky, are nice, and the grievous effects of electrocution - of one’s fortune! - are very pleasant, even lucrative, and the flaking skin - of happiness! - is - I give up. [Metaphor aborted.]

So, a year ago, I sent “The Vicksburg Dead” to Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show. It was a good story, and I thought it deserved more exposure than it got in its initial printing (and no slight to that initial printing, which was well edited and well published, but it was an indie anthology, and those can only be so successful). This was one of my favorite stories I’ve ever written, and I wanted more people to see it. So I sent it to IGMS as a reprint, and - a year later - it was accepted. It had been so long that I didn’t even know what the email was talking about until a few sentences in. A thunderbolt.

It’s my first pro sale - six cents a word, and a large readership. Two more and I can join the SFWA. And this one sale, one hopes, will wedge agents’ doors open just a leetle further when I write to them about my beautiful novels that only need an audience in order to burst into luminous sun-shattering literary rockets.

Phhffew. Now I need to come down a little bit. I’ll just contemplate for a while how a shrinking readership and rising printing and distribution costs make it virtually impossible to make a living as a novelist in this day and age. Ha! Ha!

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We saw Iron Man 2 last night. It was what we expected. It did an adequate job of distracting me from the problems of our crumbling society, our failing republic, the general existential dread that permeates all thinking creatures as cat urine permeates a mattress.

I have difficulty getting excited about movies any more. When I was a kid, special effects seemed genuinely new and interesting. I remember being amazed at Terminator 2’s effects, thinking how they changed my world, blew my mind. Now they are expected. They are distracting. They are annoying. We have so many special effects-driven blockbusters every year that they become meaningless; regardless of their actual quality, one fades into another. I barely remember Dark Knight. I know that it was better than Iron Man, but who can tell these things apart anymore? I have to make room in my memory for Iron Man 2, for 2012, for Robin Hood, for Avatar, for the next goddamn forgettable action-blast that nonetheless cost $200 million to make. How freaking disposable is our pop culture?

That said, Scarlet Johansson is - so hot. It was a bad idea to put her next to Gwyneth Paltrow and ask us to be attracted to Gwyneth Paltrow.

I also have trouble getting excited over movies because they are a mere two hours long. I don’t understand people who devour trailers, who talk or write excitedly about seeing [Whatever] because it will a two-hour experience. You see it and are done. You honestly don’t need to see Iron Man 2 twice. If you need to see Pirates of the Caribbean 3: Subtitle more than once to unpack all its subtleties, then you, sir, are an imbecile. I don’t even feel like I need to see Dark Knight twice, and it’s the densest, most cerebral summer movie we’ve had in years.

Movies are probably the most short-lived form of entertainment we have. They cost so much more to produce and take so much less time to consume than books, TV shows, video games. You pay your seven to nine bucks and see Iron Man laser-blasting robots for a little while, and you are done. It is hard to say that the experience lingers in one’s mind.

Structure structure structure structure. You can bet that there will be an initial battle where our heroes learn the nature of the enemies or their powers or whatever. Then there will be a bigger battle. The heroes will appear to be doing pretty well, but the bad guys will turn the tables and appear to be able to snatch victory from the heroes at just the last minute. It has to look like the heroes could lose at any moment, though you knew all along that they’re going to win. The same story, interchange the suit of armor or pirates or Hulk or whatever. I am bored bored bored. I want to see Iron Man succumb to alcoholism, real messy alcoholism that alienates Pepper Potts and wrecks his car. I want to see Jack Sparrow dragged to hell. I want to see the Hulk try to kill himself to free himself from his nightmare, but fail due to his invulnerability - and that failure makes him so angry that he hulks out and bites Betty in half. I want to see Spider-man forced to abort the abomination in Mary Jane’s womb - with punching. This sadism isn’t born from any misguided 80s-inspired belief that darker = deeper. It is because summer movies have made me so fucking numb that only brutal lacerations of the spirit can get me into the theatre anymore. I am sick of protagonists. I want victims and monsters.

(But I don’t want to see horror movies. Those are just awful.)

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For three years in Korea, the only English bookstore we had was a scrappy little store in Seoul called Whatthebook. Its prices were a bit steep, for used and new alike, and its sorting system was so haphazard as to be almost useless; Terry Pratchett would be filed under “Fiction” in the new book section, but under “Fantasy/Scifi” in the used books. Neal Stephenson, the opposite. So the lines were a little blurry.

Now I’ve been hitting all the old bookstore-haunts pretty hard: both Half Prices in town, the Book Rack (a sprawling derelict paperback depository in the poor part of town, the old lady captain going down with the ship), a new used bookstore with no name and a worse selection and today, finally, the Barnes & Noble megalith. We had a gift card, so we went.

While perusing all the used stores I was thinking, “I want to buy Book X; it isn’t here; it’ll probably be at B&N, albeit at a higher price.” I built my mental checklist, and in the process, I think I elevated B&N’s inventory to impossible standards, for they turned out to have very little indeed. I’m talking about big names, big important titles in genre lit: Urth of the New Sun - any of the New Sun/Long Sun books! Only China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books, no King Rat or The City & The City - only two or three Lois McMaster Bujold titles, and not a one of them a Vorkosigan book. What the hell? These are the heavy hitters of modern genre fiction. Bujold has more freaking Hugo awards than anyone other than Heinlein. Yet, almost nothing.

Gad, that made me despair. As a novelist, I hope to one day have a fraction of Bujold’s success. Does that mean my books won’t be on shelves at all?

I don’t know - I’m sure authors and actual industry people can tell you - but how many sales come from people perusing shelves and thinking, “This looks good” and picking it up? And how many sales come from fans seeking out an author’s book and ordering it off Amazon? The latter is fine for an author if they’ve already got an audience; but how far can you expand your audience if you aren’t on store shelves? I do not know! But it worries me.

Anyway, it reminded me of the argument of the validity of the F/SF “ghetto”. Heinlein is often described as the author who did the most to lift the genre out of the “genre ghetto” and give it credibility. Sure, okay. And I remember reading an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, about his (fanfreakingtastic) The Years of Rice and Salt, which is a fairly straightforward alternate history that could pass for nongenre fiction. The interviewer asked if he’d maybe like to step outside the genre and start writing mainstream fiction. His response was basically, “Why the fuck would I want to do that? I’m a scifi titan, I don’t want to be surrounded by shitty pretentious mainstream titles in the pursuit of the literati’s idea of credibility. I have an audience and plenty of fans in the ghetto, thank you.” And KSR is probably the most “literary” SF writer alive. There’s no doubt that he could succeed in the mainstream, but he’s not interested.

So I am often caught between wanting the mainstream to recognize the validity of the art form in which I work, and learning to be satisfied with doing what I do. I wouldn’t want to be in the mainstream section of the bookstore, for sure. I wouldn’t want my fans to have to sift through fifty copies of Shopaholic Contemplates Suicide to find my books. I’m sick of literati and academics who turn their noses at a work because it has spaceships, or tentacles, or tentacled spaceships; I just need to remind myself of their irrelevance.

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I have a website? What?

Egad, it’s been a week and a half. Since my last post, we had a grueling journey - not as bad as it could be, but far from a thrill. I finished Mieville’s Perdido Street Station. We were reunited with friends and family. I began Iain M. Bank’s Against a Dark Background. I built a new computer. We drove throughout our hometown, shaking our heads in resignation. We had a wild homecoming party that wasn’t actually meant to be as wild as me, Joel, and Ben made it. We played drunken badminton and somehow I cut my feet quite badly.

Let me tell you about that. I have no memory of it occurring, nor did I notice the wound the day of, but the next morning I saw that on my heel a quarter-sized flap of thick skin had been peeled back, and all sorts of black gunk had collected under that flap. I put a bandaid over it and thought about other things for a day, but, to my dismay, it had not gone away this morning. I took a pair of narrow surgical (I guess) scissors and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and went to work.

First I cut away as much of the dead skin as possible. It didn’t hurt; it was dead. However, I did have ample opportunity to observe and remark upon the amazing toughness of my heel-skin. I go barefoot quite a bit. I have cut through leather boots more easily. I considered saving the skin, but couldn’t think of a use.

Then I scraped away what gunk was now exposed. It was a mucilaginous decoction of mud, rotten leaves, sticks, and insect fragments. I carefully removed it from the raw red skin with Randi’s toothbrush. A good bit remained, packed tightly under fresh, living, tough skin that I hesitated to cut away, so I probed under the fleshy overhang with the narrow scissors-point, removing the bio-slurry speck by painful speck, flicking the bloody mud solution into Randi’s contact lens case. Finally, the foreign slime gone, I flooded the whole bloody gash with hydrogen peroxide, watched it foam, grinned at the lance of pain jabbing my heel, thinking, “I am a sinner, and this is my punishment.”

But you don’t come here to read about crude home surgery, dear reader, or at least I hope not, or you’d be disappointed more often than not. (Do you? I can try. I’ve got something stuck in my other foot that I’m looking forward to excavating, and if I know you’re interested, I’ll take notes.) You come here for my meanders on writing and politics and junk.

Ah, writing. I remember when I used to do that. These days, I’ve been concentrating on increasing my physical muscles; indeed, the effort has been productive, and I now resemble one of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical sketches. But my mental muscles have atrophied. One must write every day, you know. The simple act of putting words on page becomes easier with practice. You are able to get into the zone more quickly and be more fruitful once you get there. However, as I am lazy by nature - no, wait, I mean “laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy” - I am only able to write when I arrange my entire life around it. I must have a routine, I must have the same designated time every dang day, or I will find excuses to put it off and do other stuff, other more quickly rewarding stuff. So, about three weeks ago, when life got difficult, I put the book on hold. And there it’s been. Now I’m out of excuses - reasons, rather, there are always plenty of excuses - reasons not to work. Dammit. Tomorrow. We’ve unpacked, jet lag is gone, I’m doing it.

Now I would like to tell you a bit about cheese. The day after our return to the states, we went to Kroger, not a store renowned for its cheese selection. And yet we managed to buy no fewer than six cheeses: cheddar, pepperjack, goat cheese, parmesan, fresh mozzarella, gorgonzola. A few days later we returned to buy cheese for the party: havarti, emmental, and more pepperjack.

It’s good to be home.

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