You know, it's about the tangibility right now. If I were in the scarf business, for example, I would be feeling more valuable as a scarf maker than as a scarf designer. I would have proof in my hands, warm fuzzy proof.

This turns my normal priorities upside-down, but I don't think this is a bad thing. On Monday at some point I proclaimed that I just needed to "make something, anything. Clay pots!"

There are very good clay pots in this world, and I am not a pot maker. So it was just rhetoric.

Which is the whole POINT.

Maybe some pieces are fitting together

Synopsis progress: I have no idea.

What I will say is that I have been working on jigsaw puzzles in the evenings here and there because it has been actually cold enough to have a fire in the fireplace and a jigsaw puzzle is a nice thing to work on for a few minutes while my toes warm up. When I was little, my sister and I would do jigsaw puzzles on the floor of the sanctuary after services while our parents yakked with parishioners. When we finished, we would flip them over and do them again only looking at the gray sides. Peeking at the pictures was forbidden. We were very quick and good at them. So I am fond of puzzles, although I usually don't like the pictures on them.

Now, puzzles are really not a hobby that I will ever "pursue". They are great for fireside tables and for rainy stretches during vacations, but they are not a goal themselves. However, because I'm a competitive person, I do like to do whatever I do as well as I can, and hopefully better than the next guy. Over the years, my process has evolved into a very unlinear process that is more like clumping algae than anything else. Eventually I end up with large chunks of together pieces -- pieces themselves, you could argue -- that must be fit together. It is a much faster method (for me) than working from the outside in.

Besides puzzles, I think of myself as a linear person. I don't really have a map in my head, for instance; I have a lot of routes. I make the bed with a particular order of motions. Every time. I do things in routes, recipes of tasks.

So now, with this synopsis problem, I'm discovering that my novel is really more algae aggregation than a series of events, and figuring that out is a major big deal.

Favorites and more favorites

The Doomsday Book, Connie Willis. If formula romances are analogous to ditties, Connie Willis books are symphonies. (Formula books are fine -- ditties are fine. It's just an analogy.) I just finished Doomsday for the nth time, and it is more rewarding on every reread. I mean, it really does hit a lot of hot spots for me -- plagues and british humor and medievality and time travel and competence...

P.S. I will never understand why people don't read books or watch movies over again. If the point were to find out what happens, a synopsis would do.

P.P.S. Plagues! Come on! You can't go wrong!

Mannequins are creepy. They're like clowns and puppets, and they are used to sell things.

Many of them are headless.

My brain busies itself in the night. I wake up in the morning and am confronted with absolute nonsense on the bedside table -- half words penciled on envelope backs that mean nothing. But I'm getting higher tech about it.

Last night I sent myself three messages, using my cell phone, to my instant messenger:

Lexemic (11:47:12 PM): dmz
Lexemic (12:33:11 AM): write about parliamentary procedures
Lexemic (7:53:42 AM): this wont hurt a bit

Saturday thinking in the rain

Four more critiques of One-Two, and I might be beginning to see the issues that I need to address... important, because addressing these issues will be vital to addressing the entire Manassas universe. The comments and suggestions and criticisms have all been spot-on and so very appreciated.

(Pause to discuss how many insects we should order. "We could handle 500 in that aquarium." Yeah, we are buying bugs again.)

Here are some of the hurdles I have with Manassas. 1. I love the universe. I think this makes me particularly blind to issues. 2. The time line is shifty. It could not be described as linear. 3. Neither could the plot. (Although, it is true that a line on a mobius strip is a real line, and so if this plot is an inside-out ouroboros, which is really interesting mathematically, the line itself exists. It's just bendy.)

4. The magic of Manassas really does represent the dark reality shifts in families. You can leave your house and get a clear head for a little while about toxic behavior patterns; you can even convince yourself that it doesn't exist, but when you step back over the threshold, the old patterns take hold yet again. There is no escaping the darkness of family dysfunction, and yet if you give it up, you give up the family. You give up life and everything important. This is a good and important subject, but it takes wrestling and great concentration to get "right". I'm nowhere near perfection yet. Believe me.

5. There are a lot of Manassas stories to tell.

A whopping 46 words yesterday, the first day of my work year. Okay, so I did a little organization and a little research and a little existential musing, which does take time.

I swear, one needs to look no further than the mirror to find all the character development needed to write any kind of fiction. Yesterday, I grumped around because -- and don't laugh, you know you all have these idiocies yourselves, or at least I comfort myself with thinking that you do -- because my dishtowel basket in the kitchen keeps getting things put in it that are not dishtowels.

"Ah, maybe she's a neatnik."

No. I'm a convenience-nik. I want to grab a dishtowel entirely unimpeded by chocolate bars or avocados or someone's 7-11 receipt. If something spills, I want there to be NO barrier to my hand grabbing a clean towel to mop up. All this is very boring. But when I'm stalking around fuming, and no one has any idea why, and I'm refusing to say why, because that would sound silly, well, the dialogue that ensues INSTEAD is very interesting.

And good kind Marsh turns into snarly incomprehensible Marsh, which is probably where Stevenson got the idea in the first place.

(P.S. I got better.)