Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and so, to your delight or your chagrin (or your apathy) it’s time for another edition of my weekly blog post.  We’re roughly midway through April already, which feels pretty remarkable, but as time goes by, every day is getting shorter, to quote and/or paraphrase two songs in one sentence.

I’m back on the train (yeah) today, but—thankfully—I am not back on the chain gang*.  For various reasons, I’m now more or less committed to taking either the train or the bus to work (and back) every day.  In some ways, I prefer it.  For one thing, I can do at least part of my daily writing while commuting when I’m on public transport.  It would be incredibly reckless, and likely wreckful, for me to try to write while taking some form of transportation that was under my direct control.  It’s better to sit back and let someone else take me where I’m going.

I’ve been writing a decent amount on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado this week, though not as much as I will probably write in future weeks, since I was in transition, and that makes things go a bit slowly sometimes.  Still, on Tuesday, especially, I wrote quite a bit:  over sixteen-hundred words in one morning.  Just think, if I did that five days out of every seven, it would come to eight thousand words a week!  At that rate, I could write a novel as long as Unanimity in just over a year, though I hope not to write a story that long again if I can help it.  My current tale is beginning reasonably well, though we’ve only met one of the title characters yet.  So far, it’s definitely more fun to write this than to write Outlaw’s Mind.  We’ll see if that lasts.

I did post the latest section of Outlaw’s Mind here this week—on Tuesday this time.  It’s a bit longer than most of the other parts have been, since I included two sections with a break in between.  The first one was just so short that I thought people might feel they weren’t getting their money’s worth, so to speak, if I only posted that section.  That surely wouldn’t do.  Even when you’re not paying, you’re spending your time reading my stuff when you might be reading something else, and I want you to get as good a return on your investment as I’m able to provide.

Given that, I’m going to have to wrestle a bit with whether or not to keep working on Outlaw’s Mind.  Your feedback, if you have any to offer, would provide me some useful input regarding that decision.  We’re not getting very close yet, but every week we draw nearer to the place in Outlaw’s Mind that I’ve reached so far, and eventually, we will catch up.  By then, I’m going to need either simply to suspend those posts—maybe I’ll start sharing some of my other stories—or resume writing the story so that there will be stuff for you guys to read.

Probably I’m worrying over nothing.  I’m not sure that anyone, except perhaps immediate family, truly reads the sections of Outlaw’s Mind that I post here.  Page views and even “likes” are hard to interpret unambiguously.  I’m probably overthinking everything right from the start.  And, who knows, maybe I’ll get hit by a truck (or a bus or a train?) in the meantime and I won’t have to worry about any of it, or anything else, after that.  A guy can dream, can’t he?

I don’t mean to imply that I don’t like writing, or that I don’t like sharing some of my stories here.  I’m just chronically tired and depressed, with very little in my life other than my writing.  With respect to my stories (and blog posts), I often just feel as if they are messages in bottles, cast out into some stormy sea from the extremely remote, peculiar, and rocky desert island that is my personality.  They are unlikely ever to reach anyone at all, let alone to entice someone to want to visit such a forbidding and unpleasant place.  I don’t even want to be here, myself.

I’m not very good at promoting tourism, am I?

Anyway, I think that’s just about all I have for this week.  It’s nice to keep it “short” once in a while.  That way I can write an entire first draft during a single half-an-hour-ish train ride.  I hope you’re all doing well, or at least that you’re doing as well as you possibly can, and that you’re being good to those you love and to those who love you and being polite at least to everyone else (unless they make that impossible, which can happen).  Oh, and Happy Passover and Happy Easter to those of you who will be celebrating those holidays!  I hope you get to be with your families and that you can enjoy your time together.  Don’t underestimate the value of such things.

TTFN

I think it’s particularly appropriate to share a Passover “mosaic”**

*That’s three songs in two sentences.

**Get it?  Get it?