What I'm Reading...

A few things…

I had to break down and let some more romance fiction into my reading list – I had four things for this coming week, three magazines and one of the Nicolas Meyer Sherlock Holmes novels he’s doing these days. I didn’t want to go that route, but my options for reading material is limited right now, and I’m at the mercy of the NLS for all of this.

From the book I finished this morning – it’s got a wise woman tenet at the start of each chapter, but it’s from the perspective of a modern Texas wise woman, one who doesn’t fit the popular conception of a proper Southern lady:
“Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver, and cheap.” Heh.

I know how Presque Vu is going to end – in fact, I’ve written the epilogue. Now the trick is getting to it. I’m at about 260 pages, and this one might be one of my shorter novels, but I know I have some places where I may have glossed over a bit to get the plot down on the page. This is the most SF of the trilogy, and once it’s done that’s it – I may write a novella or two about some specific people or situations, but once these three books are finished I’m closing the door on Jenn Marcus’s world and moving to a different mountain. There’s still a whole lot of them in the current range I’m exploring.

I know some folks will want to try to solve any problems they perceive I’m having – please understand that I’ve dug down a lot already into that well (I’m aglow with metaphors today for some reason) and what you suggest may be stuff I’ve already explored; I appreciate your effort, but please don’t think I’m brushing anything you say off, because that’s not my intent.

I’m feeling embattled by online life – with some of the fornicational excrement going on right now in this particular first world country I’m less secure about letting any personal information out, even here, because the question isn’t if someone’s paranoid, it’s if they’re paranoid enough to survive in times like these.

I have early ideas percolating for the next Lieutenant Peep story, and I’m still slogging away at the third Love Meme? novel’s plot points. I’ll trip the trigger on that one in a 30 day month and burn through it in a fast cycle. There’s one more of those in the shmaybe pile, but I don’t know if I’ll choose to write it – reading romance is rough, writing it is a much deeper dive into something I’ve failed at in my life (Hey, you, yeah, you, you know who I’m talking to, put down that brickbat right now…).

I’ve got access to a jazz program I listened to back when NTRB (North Texas Radio for the Blind) was on the air, which means before eleven years ago, and one of the first ones I sought was the one about Craig Handy’s wonderful album Craig Handy and Second Line Smith, an album of Jimmy Smith’s tunes (he was one of the first big name jazz Hammond organists) done New Orleans style. This is music to dance to, and it’s way fun. Instead of a bassist he got a sousaphonist on the album, and it go so far to giving it that second line feel.

My master half-bath commode managed to migrate off its flange, so it leaks, bad, if I try to use it. I’ve got a call to my brother, but he is of course way busy right now (HVAC repair people are in a peak time) so it may be a bit before that gets fixed. Inconvenient.

A friend came over yesterday to learn about how MIDI works, but he’s got a dodgy setup, or at least some parts of it are wing and a prayer design, so we got a whole lot less done. I was hoping to turn the session into a chapter or two in the book on MIDI I’m working on, but we didn’t get near far enough. And he whines; ugh. I don’t often have to deal with emotional outbursts in my home (though I don’t deal with them much elsewhere either) so it was jarring. And at least he didn’t try use the excuse that he’s on chemotherapy, because he’s been this way long before he got cancer.

So, on to another week.

There is no Forward
But backward is also illusion
Find true perspective