Hello.  Good morning.  It’s Thursday, so of course it’s time for my weekly blog post.  This is the first blog of spring, not counting my uploading of the next part of Outlaw’s Mind earlier this week.  Although, it’s autumn in the southern hemisphere now.  I tend to prefer autumn to spring, generally, but that’s largely due to Halloween coming and the changing of the leaves.  Of course, the leaves don’t change in south Florida, so that’s annually disappointing.  I assume there are some changing autumn leaves in the southern hemisphere, at least in some places, though they may be rather different than the ones in the northern.  Are there oaks and maples and the like in the southern hemisphere?  I would guess not, but I could be quite wrong.  I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it before.

I’ve been continuing my walking, though I’ve dealt with significant foot blisters that have slowed my progress, and I’ve gone through, I think, at least three new pairs of shoes—none very expensive, thankfully—trying to find ones that minimize my trouble.  Yesterday, at least, I was able to walk five and a half miles, and at the end, my blisters felt no worse than they had before I started, so that pair of shoes gets a good grade from me.  If this keeps up, it shouldn’t be too long before I can undertake my dreamed-of epic quest.

I’ve written just over four thousand words on Outlaw’s Mind this week, after basically slacking off the rest of last week and restarting on Monday.  It’s getting harder and harder to bother with anything at all lately.  But I’m rather stubborn, and most things I do in life I do not because I feel enthusiastic but because I had decided that I was going to do them, and so go through with it.  Enthusiasm is not one of my noteworthy attributes, I fear.  Anyway, the story is progressing, and the shocking event due to happen to Timothy has now begun, and it’s only developing and worsening from here.

It’s interesting that, no matter how clearly imagined and expected the course of a plot is, there are almost always little diversions or variations due to the actions of certain characters, who do things that were not necessarily planned by the author*.  Characters have their own personalities—they almost have a kind of free will, in a way—and they must behave the way they behave, since they are people, and sometimes people do things that I wouldn’t have thought about in advance.

It’s not that it’s truly surprising, not in any profound sense; it’s just that I sometimes come to the point where I realize certain characters in a story are going to do or say things that may affect the plot, because that’s who they are.  This is not to say that the story arc has changed, just that some specifics get adjusted.  Chaos theory being what it is, of course, it is possible for characters’ actions to change the course of a story profoundly, and in ways that were not readily predictable.  This is because they are, in a sense, real people, and with a flap of their (usually figurative)** wings, they can change the weather on the other side of the world, whether it’s spring there or autumn or anything in between—or they can change the specific outcome of a story.

I don’t really have much else to write about today, I fear.  Or maybe that’s a relief.  I don’t know.  I occasionally try to express deeper, more personal concerns, here and elsewhere, but I get the impression that these are of no interest to anyone (in the blogosphere or in real life), and I don’t seem very good at expressing or conveying them, anyway.  Alexithymia, I guess, or just general awkwardness and cluelessness on my part, is or are to blame.  Eventually, I guess I’ll run out of things even to try to say—sometimes I think that has already happened, at least ten years ago—and the rest will be silence.  This will probably be a welcome happenstance for most of those who even notice it.

Be that as it may, I hope you all have a good springtime—or a lovely autumn to the people in the southern hemisphere—and that you treat well the people you love and the people who love you…and even yourselves.

TTFN

*I’m speaking hypothetically, of course.

**I have at least one prospective story in which a main character does have literal wings, and she is rather chaotic as well.