Hello and good morning.  Yeah, it’s Thursday, so here’s another edition of my now-again-weekly blog.

I actually wrote a little post on my phone at some point in between, while I was in transit last week, because something happened that frustrated me with the irrational things people do.  I haven’t looked at it again, and I certainly haven’t posted it.  Probably I never will.

I sometimes miss writing my near-daily blog posts.  They were a way for me to keep in somewhat frequent contact with people in the human world (or at least to allow the potential for people to be aware of my existence).  But I cannot muster the mental energy both to write/edit fiction and to write a blog while still working.

Actually, this last weekend, for various reasons, I had a three-day weekend for the first time in I don’t know how long—maybe as long as eight years or so, and I’m not being hyperbolic*.  Despite having that time off, I didn’t really do anything.  It basically rained the entire weekend down by me, and it was thoroughly sloppy and disgusting out, but it’s not as though I had anywhere to go even if the weather had been lovely.

Such is my life, if you can call it that:  Go to work Monday through Friday and every other Saturday, commuting quite a long way (which allows me to write while commuting, at least) and then, when off, basically just collapse on my cheap futon on the floor of my one-room dwelling and watch semi-random YouTube videos (and occasional shows on Amazon or Netflix or Hulu or whatnot).

I have, at least, been working on editing Extra Body; I’m almost finished with the third run-through.  I think I’ve done quite a lot of cutting of digressional stuff this time through, which is almost certainly good for the story.  My general practice is/has been to edit my stuff seven times—more if I haven’t been able to cut back to my word number goal—before being willing to publish.  It takes a long time, of course, though it would probably be faster if I had more mental energy and motivation.

It certainly took a long time to edit Unanimity, which was significantly over half a million words long in first draft.  That’s my personal version of what happened with The Stand  and The Lord of the Rings:  I wrote a book too long to be publishable as a single volume because it couldn’t be printed that way.

I’ve still been practicing a little bit of guitar more days than not, I guess; I even played a little bit over the weekend.  I guess I must be getting better to some degree, because a few things that used to be quite difficult for me are not nearly so hard, and I find that I can easily substitute a different version of a particular chord if I don’t like the way it’s been suggested by a given source of tabs and chords.

I guess that’s good, though I don’t know what good it actually does, even for me.  I’m way too self-conscious to play for anyone else, and I certainly haven’t tried to write any new music in a long time.  I have a few little notepad entries with lyrics I’ve come up with here and there, but they’re all just shit, so I don’t feel any desire to work on them further.  Nor do I have any urge to turn either Mercury Lamp or Come Back Again into finished, “produced” works and publish them for any streaming sources or anything.

That’s about it.  I’m basically running on fumes, as people used to say**, and I expect—and kind of hope—to run completely out of gas very soon, one way or another.  I’m actually pretty irritated by my endurance so far.  If there’s no potential light at the end of my tunnel, as there doesn’t seem to be, I wish I would just crash and burn.  I don’t want to have any kind of metaphorical multi-vehicle crash, in which any other people’s lives get ruined in the process of me self-destructing.  That would be rude.  Although, I suppose, if I could somehow manage to arrange it so that I took some true villain, or some significant instance of villainy*** with me, it might be worth it.

Anyway, that’s enough for this week.  I spaced out for a good five minutes just now, which seems to indicate that I don’t have much more to think for the moment, let alone to say.  The weather is horribly muggy here, and I’m sweating just from typing while sitting still, which really shouldn’t generate all that much heat.

I hope you all had a decent holiday weekend (those who actually observed Labor Day, of course).  I hope you’re having a decent beginning of September, which is the current month.  It includes a few important birthdays to me, and of course, Autumn begins in September (in the Northern hemisphere).  But there’s no real Autumn in south Florida, anyway, so that’s just a tease.

Oh, well, to hell with it.

TTFN

*Neither am I being spherical or toroidal; I’m pretty much being strictly Euclidean as far as I can tell.

**Of course, it’s only the vapor of gasoline that ever ignites to provide impetus in the internal combustion engine, but the gasoline is stored as a liquid, at least.

***In my judgement, anyway.  I certainly can’t use anyone else’s judgement, after all, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to do so if I could.