Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and for the 4^th day in a row, I’m writing this on my lapcom.  Well, actually, I can’t be writing this—i.e., this blog post—for the 4^th day in a row, lapcom or otherwise.  I am writing a blog post, and that is something I am doing on the lapcom for the 4^th day in a row.  Sorry if that was confusing*.

It seems, as with yesterday’s date, that I haven’t written a post using the lapcom on the 29^th of October since 2022, which feels like an inordinate amount of time.  That means I’ve been writing on the smartphone since then, barring those October 29^ths that were on Sundays or non-working Saturdays.  No wonder my thumb bases have become progressively sorer.  I’m surprised they have given me more trouble than they have.

Well, I’m not actually surprised.  There’s no metaphorical gasping jolt.  It’s just that it’s not what I would have expected if I had thought about the situation ahead of time.  Of course, I don’t think I did think about the situation ahead of time; I certainly don’t recall thinking about it ahead of time.  If I had recalled such a thing, I probably wouldn’t have been even figuratively surprised.

Anyway, I ordered a couple of thumb/wrist braces that came up when I searched for such devices to counter the arthropathy associated with writing on the smartphone.  There’s even an official name for the problem.  It’s something pithy but obvious like “texter’s thumb”, though I don’t believe that is the actual standard term being used, and I can’t be arsed to look up the real one.

In any case, the braces should be arriving today.  They were the highest rated ones on Amazon, at least the highest rated ones that could arrive quickly.  We’ll see if they provide any help and if so how much.

In other news:  after talking about the subject yesterday, I decided I would reread what I’d written so far on Outlaw’s Mind, specifically the version in which I chopped off the old original “cold open”.  I had uploaded a copy of it (so far) onto Google Drive, so I’ve been able to read it on my phone, and I have to admit, it flows quite nicely.  I like it so far.

There are a few things here and there that will need tweaking to get it into shape and to eliminate the relics of the former thought process behind the story, but they’re pretty minor.  I may also read The Dark Fairy and the Desperado after that.  Who knows?  I might even reread Extra Body, which is an actually completed story, though it has not been extensively edited.

All of you can read the stories as far as they have gone, here on my blog.  If you are so inclined and want to give me feedback on of which one you might want to read more if you were given the choice, I would be interested to hear.  I’m not making any promises, but maybe if I enjoy a story (so far) and you guys are interested, that might spur me to action.

It would be interesting to see if I could write a serialized story and post it here on my site.  That might be worthy of Patreon or Ko-fi or what have you.  But I don’t know if I could successfully do that in an ongoing fashion—it would involved editing each “chapter” as I went along, with no ability to go back and fix missteps in the story.

Still…maybe that might be something I could do with my longstanding story idea Changeling in a Shadow World.  I’ve mentioned this story here on several occasions, but I don’t think I’ve said much more about it.  It’s a story that would run alongside and behind several other tales of mine, including such seemingly disparate ones as The Chasm and the Collision, Unanimity, The Vagabond, and even Outlaw’s Mind.

It also would tie back to Ends of the Maelstrom, the first novel I ever finished writing (in first draft).  It was all handwritten, single-spaced, with additional writing in the margins—the ones that I hadn’t chewed to bits already—and in the spaces above other print.  It was over 270 densely packed pages long (both sides).

In my mind, I’ve taken that story to be a kind of origin or backstory for some of the largest scale tendencies in the universes of my stories.  Of course, that physical book is long gone—lost with almost all the other property I used to own before I went “up the road”.  That, my piano, my cello, my books, and my comic book collection are probably the only things I really feel sad about losing.  I do feel a pang about some of my kids’ childhood toys that are lost, but they were in storage already, so probably they don’t miss them as much as I do.

Anyway, I don’t want to get all of your hopes up, and even more crucially, I don’t want to get my hopes up regarding getting back into writing fiction and maybe serializing something here on my website.  But at least I’m thinking of possible positive thoughts.

Maybe it’s just a mood swing, though.  That sort of thing makes me a bit nervous, especially since yesterday afternoon I felt absolutely dismal and willfully moribund, if you will.  I don’t know what’s behind such variations, though I have suspicions and speculations.

I think at least some of my increased ambition comes from the fact that I am writing on the lapcom now, and that feels so much more natural than the alternative.  On the other hand, perhaps I am only writing on the lapcom as a consequence of an upswing in some mood cycle that was already happening, and so the direction of forces is not the one way but the other.

This is the perennial conundrum of correlation versus causation.  It’s very important in scientific thinking and also in more general thinking.

Anyway, this has gotten pretty long today.  I think you can probably imagine how readily I used to write about 1,400 words per day, can’t you?

Speaking of days, I hope you have a good one.  I shall be writing another post tomorrow (exclusis improvisis), but I will not be writing one on Halloween, since I don’t work on Saturday.  Maybe I’ll discuss Halloween (and Devil’s Night) tomorrow.  But maybe I won’t.  We’ll all have to wait and see.

TTFN

*I suspect no one was actually confused, but I had to correct my own words’ literal interpretation, because it didn’t make sense…if taken literally.  Which, I suspect, is almost never done, except perhaps by other people with similar sensibilities to mine.