30 January 2003

Another nightmare. Wooo. Yeah.

This is a tiresome pattern for me, so I'm not surprised if it's getting tiresome for some of you as well. I promise I'll stop it as soon as I get the chance. I'm not doing it as a gimmick.

The rest of yesterday was fine, though. I had excessive amounts of energy in the morning and had to resort to the Bosstones. Excessive indeed. I don't know that it was due to not waking up from a nightmare, but it did kind of have that relieved feeling, that post-"think of how good it'll feel when it stops" sort of feeling. I don't have that this morning. Ooh! Bad metaphor time: it feels like I was clubbed over the head by the caveman of awakening and dragged back to the cave of this morning. Isn't that awful? And isn't "The Caveman of Awakening" a horrible short story name?

If any of you use it for a genuine short story, I'll come club you. It's just bad.

I worked through the last of the Grey Place edits for the time being, I think -- I'm going to read through them today and see what I think of it, and then either redo some stuff or get feedback on them. I also got into a pretty good Dwarf's Blood Mead mode, and I think that'll continue into today and possibly tomorrow and the weekend as well.

I've got a grasp on the slippery bits, is what I think. And (much to Thomas' probable disappointment) they do not involve flammable horse sweat. I'm okay with that, on the whole. They do involve a slightly different tack on a couple of the relationships in the book, which is all for the best etc. It's too politically straightforward as it stands. I need to work on that. I need to edit the first half that way, but I'll deal with that later. For now: onwards.

And yesterday I got to read Fire and Hemlock, which was awesome, and you should go read it immediately. Diana Wynne Jones. I found it in the YA section, but I can't vouch for where they'll shelves it where you are, children's or YA or fantasy or what. But look for it. If you don't find it immediately, keep looking. Or Amazon should work. Yeah. Good stuff. Definitely. I don't know if I'm a sucker for Tam Lin stories or what, but this was an instant favorite. It's a miracle I did as much work as I did yesterday (which was in the range of a lot), because I kept wanting to go sit down and read this book.

I also read Absolute Zero, the second book in The Bagthorpe Saga, which I loved as a kid. And now I'm thinking, "Why did I love this as a kid? I didn't get half these jokes! This is not for kids!" Well, it is for kids; there's enough accessible humor that you don't have to recognize which bits were named after Lord Peter Wimsey's country estate, for example. But there are all kinds of references I'm now finding hilarious. It's a totally different good experience than it was when I was 8 and didn't know why the housekeeper contemplating her canned goods was said to sound like the Fool from King Lear. Or what on earth the father was talking about with The Monkey's Paw.

I've got the next book in the series (Bagthorpes Unlimited) from the library, too, and I'm going to read it today, and when I go back to the library, I'll get more of them. It would have been best to start with the first one, Ordinary Jack, but I already sort of remembered it. I'm glad these books held up, though. I had forgotten their titles or their author (Helen Cresswell) and just had recollections of the covers. Which were, I'm glad to say, quite accurate, but they were also rather useless to me until Alec provided the names again.

Okay, well...it's the last day of Communicate With M'rissa Week, people. Don't miss out! Not that you can't send me e-mail tomorrow or something. I'm just sayin'. It would be a thoughtful notion, is what.