25 August 2001

Lots on the agenda for this weekend. It didn't feel so much like it to me, but when I gave the list to Mark, he scowled sleepily and said, "That sounds suspiciously like work." Well, yeah. It does. But it'll be good work....

So one of the things I'm doing is making apple bread from K-Mag's recipe. K-Mag was one of my "second mothers" when I was little, and her apple bread was one of my favorite festive foods. So was her peanut butter/chocolate ribbon fudge, but I'm not making that for Avi's party. I already made strawberry-lemon cheesecake bars, which are taking up much of the fridge right now. People who move, take note: we reward parties. Timprov is finally making his ahi with peaches for lunch today. We had a harder time finding the ahi than one might think. I'm looking forward to it.

I read Four Finns: Political Profiles yesterday. My land. That thing was literally half footnotes. Half! I like footnotes as well as the next guy (unless the next guy is Mark, in which case not quite so well), but more than half seems like rather poor structure. Hard to build up a flow of prose when you're having to skip into another sentence in the middle of each one. And it was originally written in English, so translation problems are no excuse. Now I've started The Quorum, borrowed from Tim, on the theory that I can return it to him tonight at Avi's if I finish it. The Obvious Trick the author is using to make me care about what happens later in the book is not working; I hope there are more reasons to care about the characters later. Or maybe I'm just feeling snippy. I'm not usually so belligerent towards other writers: "Oh yeah? Make me care." Perhaps I should set it aside for a more charitable mood.

I think I got over the hump on this short story that's been plaguing me all week, though. I think I can just finish the draft this weekend. Perhaps today. I got a bunch of work done on it yesterday and last night, also a bunch done on the Not The Moose Book. Glorious, lovely Not The Moose Book. Allowing me to write at will, just sit down and write on it. The thing is, there's so much of it that it'll be awhile before just sitting down and writing on it at will will add up to a significant chunk of the book. It's going to end up somewhere between Declare and Cryptonomicon in length, I think. (More towards Declare, I hope. But then, I'm not including any programs in my indices; this book will be exportable without being classified as munitions.) It's just a big story. It's So Cool.

I'm a little nervous about meeting writer-types tonight, because I fear I will be unable to resist telling them how So Cool my new book is. And after awhile, that gets really old. I will try to restrain myself.

But it is. So Cool.