Creative Writing

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Brief Wednesday writing report and digressions

Today’s writing on Extra Body:

“Block” words:  738

Net words: 698

Evidently, I cut a fair few words (40 overall) in my rereading/editing of previous writing, making the difference about 5.7% today, an unusually large disparity, at least since I’ve started keeping track.  The total number of words in the story as of today is 48,422, and it is 71 pages long (single-spaced on Word in Calibri 11-point).

As I wrote today, I came to worry that I had given my character a work-week that was now almost eight days long, because I had the character mention that the weekend was coming, but it seemed a long time since the previous weekend.  So, I scrolled back up through the story, noting the day of the week in any given scene, and realized that in the moment of the story that I wrote today, it was Thursday evening.  The weekend was indeed just about to arrive.

Apparently, somewhere in my mind, I had kept track of the days in the story better than I thought I had.

This sort of thing happens to me a lot.  I seem underdeveloped in the usual tendency toward mental self-confidence, and so I frequently check and recheck things to make sure they are as I thought they were.  I check my pockets to make sure my keys are there probably several dozen times a day or more, for instance.  I’m pretty good at mental arithmetic–I do it as part of my job, for one thing, and I can total up the sales numbers as they happen faster than other people can when they use calculators, but then I always recheck the totals three different ways using Excel, and when they are all the same and agree with my numbers, I consider it tolerably likely that I’m correct.  But I never feel certain.  Even though mathematics is the realm of theorems, and once proven, such theorem-laden information should be epistemologically final, I don’t ever feel final about it.  Perhaps this is part of why I am incapable of being religious; faith doesn’t even make any sense to me.

I also find that confidence, as expressed by other people, especially strong confidence, is almost always distasteful, in a powerful, visceral way.  I have severe contempt for people who make declarative statements about things they cannot know for sure, especially about the states of mind of other people, and about other people’s intentions.  Observing discourse about politics is almost always nauseating and infuriating.

The more confident someone is, the less I trust them, because I’ve noted that most people are far more confident than they are justified in being about most things.  And yet, many humans respond to the confident people positively, granting them pseudo-authority, even when–perhaps especially when–their confidence is not based upon anything testable or peer-reviewed or reliable.  This is part of why I hate thinking of those who hold political office as “leaders”.  They are almost always not leaders in any meaningful sense of the term, or they should not be.  I think it would be much better to think of them as employees, and to treat them accordingly.

Oh, well.  Perhaps this sense of uncertainty and the lack of reliability of people who nevertheless have outsized impacts on the lives of others is part of why I have trouble sleeping (though I think it’s mainly inherent and neuro-humoral, and related to what I suspect is ASD).

I slept a little better last night than the night before or the night before that, though it’s not saying much.  I felt vague and punchy all day yesterday, and I pseudo-jokingly said to my coworker that I wondered if anyone knows how to get in touch with Michael Jackson’s former doctor, because I could really use some Propofol.  It’s a pseudo-joke because, while I said it as if it were a joke, if someone offered me the option of being put under with it, even given the risk of death, I might take that offer.  I would certainly consider it.  Though I would have to feel reasonably confident that I was getting what I thought I was getting.  I suppose that’s part of why I wouldn’t really ever want to use illicit drugs–I would never feel comfortable that I was actually getting what I thought I was getting, let alone in any kind of reliable dose.

I hope you all feel vastly better than I feel.  It would be at least some crumb of comfort to be reasonably convinced that the large majority of people in the world tend to be much happier and healthier than I am.  If not, then what’s the point of bothering with the world?

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If Tuesday morning is like this, and Tuesday afternoon is never-ending…

It is Tuesday morning, the 28th of May in 2024 AD or CE, depending on how you prefer to write it.  I suppose it doesn’t really matter much to me; I’m okay either way.  I only first encountered the designation “CE” by the time I was in college (or “university”‒again depending on your preference), but I get why people use it.

I guess it’s probably silly to think that anyone should care whether I indicate what calendar era it is in which I’m writing.  I don’t suppose anyone would think I was writing a blog post in 2024 BC (aka “BCE”).  How would one even know toward which year one was counting down, if one were writing such dates?  Still, who knows how dates may change in the future, and whether someone might stumble across my blog posts in some unguessed age, on some weird, digital archaeological expedition.

How will such searches of the past even happen in the future?  If we advance beyond our current kind of online and personal storage, what would even happen to the data presently on the Internet and web and cloud and whatnot?  Heck, if all power went out for a significant amount of time in the near future, I would suspect that much of the stored data on the net might be lost.

Of course, quantum information will be conserved, if we understand that part of nature as well as we seem to understand it.  But the fact that it exists is not the same as being able to recover it.

Online is not forever.  Even if the actual data related to something sticks around, there will be so much other data that it will be as invisible as a single leaf in the Amazon rainforest as seen from space.  Perhaps far more so.  Very little that happens online is salient to anyone even as it happens, let alone after much time has passed.

Anyway…I’m writing this post on my phone in the back of an Uber heading to the office, because I again slept horribly last night, despite taking melatonin early in the evening.  I don’t know what to do about this sleep problem.  As John at the bar said to Bill*, I believe this is killing me.  And I don’t think I’m being melodramatic or hyperbolic**.

I mean to write at least a little bit of fiction this morning, but my last experience using the laptop computer in the backseat of an Uber was unpleasant.  To be honest, though, just about everything is unpleasant now.  There’s little if anything that brings me even transient joy.  There is occasional, momentary escape in the form of humor, for instance, but even that is becoming more and more difficult.  Mainly, I just feel ridiculously tense and guarded and tired and in pain pretty much all the time, or at least the vast majority of it.

I don’t want to keep doing this.  It’s just not worth it.  Nothing I do and nothing about me is worthwhile.

<sigh>  I’ll add an addendum about my fiction writing before I post this.

***

Well, I wrote 798 “block” words and 799 net words, which means that when I reread stuff today I added a word relative to the previous state of the story.  Still, like yesterday, it seems the difference is only one word, so I’m well below the roughly 3% difference seen in the past.  I don’t know if that’s good or bad or merely a neutral fact.

I could feel how foggy and vague I was while writing, so I forced myself to keep it short.  Actually, I had to force myself to write as much as I did, which was one page.  I’m not sure what my average page number per day has been since I started.  Most days that I write, I write well over one page and usually over two pages, but there have been many non-writing days, so it may average about one a day.  It’s a bit over 45 pages long so far, if memory serves.

No, that’s dead wrong.  It’s actually 70 pages long (I just checked).  That can’t be just a page a day, can it?  Have I been working on this story for more than two months?  I can’t remember.  If anyone out there has been paying attention, please let me know.

Okay, well, that’s enough of that.  I’m done for the day, at least on this stuff.  I feel like I’m done for everything else, too, but of course, the workday hasn’t even really gotten started.  I’m so tired.  This has to end soon.  Everything hurts, and nothing is beautiful, to reverse Vonnegut’s famous quote, as I like to do (I think I’ve done this recently, haven’t I?).  I only even keep moving at all out of habit.  I need just to lie down, figuratively, and let the elements*** take me.

I guess we’ll see if I’m strong enough to do that.  Meanwhile, all of you please have a good day.

*In the song Piano Man by Billy Joel

**As far as I know, I’m Euclidean.

***Or the elephants.  I’m not picky.

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Monday report, 5-27-2024

I did not write or go to work on Friday.  I started to develop a “classic migraine”, i.e., one that begins with a visual “aura”, on Thursday while on my way back to the house, and despite three Ibuprofen and a caffeine pill, it developed and lasted well into the following evening.  I achieved nothing of worth nor of any real enjoyment over the weekend, so there’s nothing to report regarding that.  I was very much lying about, punctuated by a few short walks to the store (and a malfunction of the clothes washing machine on Sunday morning in the middle of my second load, forcing me to wring out those clothes before putting them in the dryer), because my back was acting up something fierce–possibly because I’d been lying around (in the dark) in a funny way due to my migraine.

Anyway, this morning I wrote some on Extra Body:  1,262 “block” words, but with a net 1,261 total new words, which means that, in my rereading and editing, I took out one more word than I added.

Since I have no life, there is nothing else to report other than that, as usual, there was a bunch of catch-up stuff to do at the office this morning, but I’m awake early in the morning, anyway.  It’s Memorial Day in the US, of course, but our office is open.  We would probably be open on Christmas if anyone would come in, and we are usually open on New Year’s Day.

I hope those of you who observe it have a good Memorial Day, and that those of you who don’t observe it nevertheless have a good day.

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Brief-ish report on Wednesday morning, May 22, 2024 AD/CE

Well, I slept somewhat better last night than the night before; it would not have been easy to sleep worse.  I took a full Benadryl (actually, a generic version of it), and two extra-strength Tylenol (also generic), and I slept a total of perhaps four and a half hours.  That’s not much, but it’s enough to make me feel better than I did yesterday.

Again, that’s not a high bar to clear.  I spent the entire day yesterday wishing I were dead, feeling like some Earth-bound phantom of some unimportant, nameless soul who had died alone a long, long time ago (to quote David Bowie).

Not one person in the office asked if I was okay or if I needed anything, or if I was having trouble.  I guess my emotions and state really are hard for other people to see from my appearance.  It’s too bad, because if someone had asked, I really was going to tell them, “I wish I were dead.”  Unfortunately, no one asked, so that was a missed opportunity.  Of course, even if I had said that, people probably would have thought I was joking, or that I was exaggerating, and certainly no one would have tried to help me in any way.

I suppose that’s par for the course.  I’ve needed help for a long time, honestly, and I’ve tried to be worthy of help; I have helped other people when I could, though I don’t think I’ve done very much good for anyone, in the long run.  I think I’m probably a lost cause, anyway.  I guess that’s okay.  Honestly, I’m so freaking tired that I don’t know if I’d be able to help anyone who was trying to help me, if you take my meaning.  I just want to rest.

Anyway, this morning I did write some on Extra Body.  As is often the case, I started just telling myself that I was only going to write one page, no more, but once I got started, I kept going.  It helped that there was a guy on the train asking people to fill out surveys about the train service, and I told him, “Sorry, I’m working on something.”  I did have my laptop computer open and was typing when he approached me.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate and approve of the organization trying to get feedback to help improve its operations, but I don’t like being talked to in the morning.  So, that impelled me to keep typing until it was time to get ready to get off the train, so the guy wouldn’t feel tempted to come back and ask me again.

In the end, the word count of the block of new writing was 2,079, but the net word count gain was 2,008.  So, this time, unlike Monday, I edited out words in the stuff I was rereading instead of adding some–a total of 71, evidently.  That’s good to know, somehow.  That’s about a 3.5% difference between the two counts, a little more than Monday, but not much.  Of course, my sample size is only two days, so we’ll have to wait and see if there’s a clearer statistical trend.

And that’s all I have for you this morning.  I’m planning to write my traditional Thursday post tomorrow, which is good, since tomorrow is Thursday.  It is, isn’t it?  Yes, it is, I just checked.  Anyway, I hope you all have a good day.

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Numbers of words and words of thoughts and thoughts of consciousnesses

Since I came up with the idea and mentioned it in my blog on Saturday, I could not fail to put the idea into practice of keeping count of both the number of words in the new “block” of fiction writing I did today and to keep track of the change in the total word count, to compare them.  This was especially true since, on rereading what I had written on Saturday, I realized that I had started a conversation between two characters rather abruptly, and so I added in a more natural beginning to that interaction while I was editing.

This didn’t have as big an impact as it might have, since I also pruned things slightly while rereading.  In any case, I kept track of the net total word change and the word count in the new block of writing, and those numbers are:  1,228 words in the new block written today, but a net increase in word count of 1,264.

I don’t know how representative this is of the typical disparity, but it’s less than a 3% difference whether you use the larger or the smaller number as your denominator, so it’s not huge.  Still, I’ll probably keep this up, at least for a while.

After I had finished writing and gotten up to get ready to get off the train, I had a weird train (ha ha) of thought that led from me thinking about the fact that one can no longer readily stream series A through I of the British show QI in the US, to how I had needed to order the DVDs for those seasons through Amazon UK, which I did quite some time ago.  This led me to think about the shipping process, and how seamless and rapid it had been–it was not as fast as ordering something that’s sourced locally, but nevertheless it was impressively rapid.

And I thought of the various people involved, and how not one of them had been aware of the whole process from beginning to end, and indeed, possibly not one of them had thought about what was being sent and to where.  Each part of the process was more or less automated, or at least occurred “locally”, in a phase-space sense*.  And yet, the whole has become a process that takes place with remarkable efficiency, despite no member of the chain of the process really knowing too much beyond their own part of the job.

And I thought, the whole economy is like this, locally, nationally, and globally.  Indeed, all of civilization is like this; everyone simply acts in response to local forces and events and incentives and disincentives, and the process turns into a self-sustained, much larger entity that has not been created by anyone, and is certainly not run by anyone (any more than a bee hive or an ant hill is “run” by the queen insect).  Nor should it be, since no human mind is capable even of grasping very precisely and in detail anything beyond a tiny part of the thing itself–this is probably part of why “planned economies” always fail, and until there is a super-intelligent AI (and perhaps even then) they always will.  It’s like trying to put one single nerve cell in charge of the entire human brain and body.  It simply doesn’t have the capacity to do such a thing.  When one nerve cell’s activity spreads with relatively little impediment through the brain, you get what we call a seizure.

Anyway, all that led me to thinking about whether it would ever be possible for a civilization, in the aggregate, to become truly sentient and self-aware.  I don’t mean that the members are self-aware; obviously they are already (at least some of them, and to varying degrees).  I mean, could the civilization as a whole develop self-awareness, develop what the philosophers of mind call “qualia“.

Our civilization is probably far too small to instantiate such a thing, currently.  There are after all “only” about 8 billion humans on Earth, compared to, for instance, the roughly hundred billion neurons in each individual human brain (mileage may vary) and tens of trillions of cells in an entire human body.  But perhaps, someday, if a civilization becomes large enough and remains interconnected enough, the lights may come on, so to speak–actually it would probably be a gradual process, rather like those European, “energy-saving” lights; it’s unlikely to be an instantaneous change.  But it could, in principle, happen.

Of course, those who espouse the so-called Hard Problem of Consciousness™, might say that it could never happen, that qualia, that true consciousness requires some other ingredient or process.  I’ve never encountered an argument from any of them that impresses me, though.  Even Roger Penrose’s ideas about quantum mechanical processes being necessary for human consciousness–in denial of the Church-Turing Thesis and related ideas of universal computation–seems to me to be pure motivated reasoning, albeit by one of the great minds of the modern world, so it’s still worth exploring his ideas.  Even when he’s wrong, Penrose’s thought is more fruitful than that of the vast majority of people when they right, yours truly included.

I’ve arrived at no conclusions, of course.  It was just an interesting mental diversion that I thought I would share with you readers, since I have no one else with whom to share such things.  If any of you have any thoughts or ideas about them, please feel free to leave a comment below, here on my blog proper, not on other social media–I would prefer a forum in which other people who read comments on my blog could comment, too, and that’s not likely to happen on Facebook or on “the site formerly known as Twitter”.

Okay, that’s it for today.  I’m not going to edit this much before posting, so apologies if there is any persistently awkward wording or if there are any unnoticed typos.  Have a good “Not Memorial Day” day**.

*Of course, everything in the universe behaves locally–even quantum entanglement is “local” in a very specific sense.  Even gravity is local–the local gravitational “field” responds to the state of the nearby gravitational field, not literally to distant objects, which is part of why gravity can “escape” from black holes.  The larger-scale laws of nature emerge “spontaneously” from all these tiny, local interactions, or so it seems based on the best information I have.

**I mistakenly thought today was going to be Memorial Day because people at work kept talking as if it were.  However, that holiday is next Monday.  Sorry if I confused anyone, and thank you to my cousin for pointing it out to me.

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A brief Saturday morning report on May 18, 2024 CE

I just wanted to keep in contact with anyone who is following my progress and to let you know that I wrote about 1,261 words this morning.  I say “about” because, though that is the number of words in the completely new writing I did today, every morning I reread at least a majority of what I wrote the previous day to get myself back into the swing of the story, and I edit as I do this.  This morning, I know that I added at least one decently long sentence during that process, but I probably took some words out, too.  That makes the true number of words added unlikely to be exactly 1,261.

Of course, there is a way to keep track.  I could note the total word count prior to beginning my editing and writing for the day and then, when done, compare the numbers.  This would give the absolute increase in word count for the day.  It might even be mildly interesting to track how this compares to the word count of the new portion written for the day.  Does it tend to be higher?  Does it tend to be lower?  Is there no overall tendency?  However, to do this, I would need to keep notes about the process somewhere, perhaps at the bottom of the file.  That would change the actual word count of the file, though.  Alternatively, I could make a new file the entire purpose of which is to keep notes on such things.  But that would entail the extra effort of dealing with the extra file every day.

So, unless some readers out there in my reader-verse show any interest in getting reports about such minutiae, I probably won’t start keeping track.  But, then again, now that I’ve thought about it, knowing how weirdly obsessive I can get with numbers, maybe I will.  Probably, the only thing that will stop me is my less-than-stellar level of personal energy.

Tomorrow I am off work, of course, but though Monday is a Federal Holiday in the US (Memorial Day, the unofficial “beginning of summer”, and the day we officially remember soldiers who have died in wars for our country), our office will be open and so I will be doing some writing, barring the unforeseen.  Have a good weekend in the meantime, please.

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Very brief report

I did write a bit of fiction this morning — 783 words to be exact and precise.  I wish it were a prime number, but it’s divisible by 3 and 9 at least, since the digits add to 18.  Oh, well, it can’t always work out.

I’m feeling quite unwell; yesterday I left the office early (not by much) and yet I still didn’t get any good sleep.  But I’ve felt queasy and weak and just kind of under the weather for the last 18 hours or more.  So, I didn’t really have the energy to write more.  I did play a little guitar and sang some this morning, but it was sub-par, probably because of feeling poorly.

I am scheduled to work tomorrow, though, so maybe I’ll feel a little better then and will write some more.  I guess we’ll see.  Have a good day.

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And writers say, the most forward bud is eaten by the canker ere it blog

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, so it’s time for my Thursday blog post.  There will be no fiction from me today, other than such ordinary, day-to-day fiction as pretending to be doing better than I really am, as well as using money to buy things*.

I’m writing this on my phone, since I didn’t bring the laptop computer back to the house yesterday.  I was wiped out, and stressed out, and I didn’t feel like carrying any more than necessary.  I did get a bit of walking in, since I had to stop at the store on the way back.  I guess that was good, though something in the way I moved caused a blister on the medial side of my right big toe.  It’s not too bad, but I’ll probably not do any serious walking today.

It’s often questionable why I bother.  Of course, I would like to lose weight and whatnot; I would rather not die the physical travesty that I currently am.  But the best way to do that would be to stop eating completely.  That would be a win-win situation, as the cliché goes.  But that is very difficult to do in ordinary, day-to-day life in the modern United States.

I got a terrible night’s sleep again last night.  It wasn’t as bad as my one-hour night earlier in the week, but it wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’ve been trying to restrict my caffeine intake to the relatively early morning, just to make sure that doesn’t interfere with my sleep, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.

I haven’t read anything much in quite a while.  I think it’s been over a month since I read any book, fiction or nonfiction.  I have been doing some stuff on Brilliant dot org, as I’ve mentioned here, but yesterday I didn’t even feel like extending my “streak” by doing some simple work in their computer programming course.  For one thing, the constant prods to “extend one’s streak” are thoroughly irritating.

I really despise all the manipulative tactics undertaken by these companies to get people to keep using their sites.  Even Kindle does it.  I had a “streak” of something like 170 or more weeks of reading pretty much every day on my Kindle app, but that’s now been broken, and already Amazon isn’t even recommending any e-books to me.

Still, it’s not as though I ever read to maintain a “streak”.  I read because I want to read.  Except right now I don’t.  I don’t even want to read my own stuff.

I did practice a little on the guitar yesterday.  I guess that’s something.  And, as you all know, I’ve been writing fiction now for a total of over twenty days (counting only writing days).  But it feels almost disloyal to be writing without reading, though it’s only myself that I’m betraying, and I don’t like myself, anyway.  Still, reading has been a fundamental part of my identity for literally as long as I can remember, and not being able to do it makes me feel very much adrift and puzzled.

It’s getting seriously hot and muggy down here in Florida.  I’m sweating significantly and quite visibly just sitting at the train station.  I suppose, if climate change persists, Florida will at least reap what it has politically sown, since both the heat and the sea levels are likely to drive quite a lot of people out of the state, and make much of the coveted ocean-front property into literal and figurative underwater real estate.

I’m not the sort to laugh in malicious glee when people get their comeuppances; I’m much more the type to tighten my lips grimly and nod in affirmative contempt.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not ego-syntonic for me when people get fucked over because of their own arrogant stupidity.

I don’t expect to be around to see any of it happen.  And, honestly, I would not be disappointed if people actually make headway at fixing the problems and correct them in time to save even people who don’t necessarily deserve to be saved, because innocent and beneficent people will be saved along with them.

Human ingenuity is much rarer than people probably think; however, it is so incredibly powerful that it doesn’t take much of it to accomplish wonders.  I guess it’s worth it for there to be so much arrogant stupidity if that’s necessary or unavoidable in order for the occasional sparks of cleverness and even genius to be found.  But it would be nice if stupidity were more sexually unappealing than it is.  Regrettably, though, stupid people seem more likely to breed than smart ones, especially since the smart ones understand about planning and delaying reproduction, or even choosing not to reproduce at all.

Oh, well.  This is the tragic farce of life.  It can be funny if you like lowbrow slapstick in the vein of the Three Stooges.  Unfortunately, I’m not really a big fan of such things, so I don’t think I’m going to keep watching much longer.

All right.  Time to call this to an end.  My back is flaring up quite a lot, probably from yesterday’s walk, and it’s distracting me.  Please try to nurture cleverness and creativity at all levels, and please don’t feed the trolls in any sense.  They’re not worth it.

TTFN

*Yuval Harari famously pointed out that money is a “fiction”, though it is a useful and important one.  So is law and government and the very existence of rights and stuff like that.  Such things exist only in the minds and works of people.  Nature certainly recognizes no rights, unless you want to count the right to be wiped out if you don’t do what you need to survive.  Indeed, the world seems to promise only one thing:  eventually, you (as well as everything you would recognize as the universe) will die.  That’s probably a truly unalienable right.

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Very brief report, Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Despite some modest interruptions to my routine this morning, I’ve already written 1,746 words today on Extra Body.  Some comparatively remarkable and momentous things are beginning to happen in the story now–well, there have been remarkable occurrences throughout, but now we’re getting near to the final “confrontation” of the tale.  The story is over 40,000 words long already, though I plan to reduce the total significantly in rewriting/editing.

I slept a bit better last night than the night before; it’s a low bar, but I did clear it, if only by a few more hours.  Still, I’m physically just worn out but unable to sleep.  Also, the tinnitus persists in my left ear, though not as bad as the right.  My right ear is chiming away at what seems like a subjective 70 decibels or so.  I’m almost to the point of reversing Vonnegut’s quote and saying, “Nothing was beautiful and everything hurt,” but there are a few non-painful things.  Or, well, at least there’s one:  writing fiction.

Anyway, tomorrow is Thursday, so I’ll write my traditional blog post then.  In the meantime, have a good day.

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Tuesday report: May 14, 2024 AD (or CE)

Well, I’ve written 1,419 words of fiction this morning already, having decided again that I would write at least one full page and then going beyond that.  I could’ve written even more, but I didn’t want to bother, and I figured I’d write a quick blog post/report for the day during the rest of my commute.  I’m not even going to change the base font to Calibri for this, since it’s just going to be converted on WordPress, anyway.

Extra Body is getting ever closer to its first-draft completion, though I doubt it will be finished this week.  Still, it shouldn’t be much later than that.  It’s rather absurd and pathetic that my “short story” is now over 38,000 words long.  This is despite me having missed quite a few days’ writing on and off.

I really don’t feel well, though.  I had an unusually bad sleep last night, even for me—though perhaps I should no longer think of such nights as bad “for me”, since they seem to happen so very often.  Anyway, I got significantly fewer than two hours of sleep, and I had to force myself not just to get up when my brief slumber had already started to fade, nearly an hour earlier than I eventually did (and less than an hour after I finally dropped off).

It’s maddening, and I was already mad enough when I started out—in the old-school sense of “mad”, meaning insane, not angry.  Though I really think of myself more as “unsane”, since I don’t think my mental health or my mental state has ever been what most people would consider normal.

I’m severely tired of all this.  Even despite now writing new fiction, I feel a constant, varying mixture of despair and apathy, seasoned with pain and tension, accompanied by the high-pitched whines of tinnitus.  I know, there are many worse situations for someone to need to endure, and many people endure them and have endured them.  But I have no purpose, no reason, no value, and no desire to endure or to find an answer.  I’ve spent so much time and effort already trying and failing to do those things; it doesn’t work.

So, like Extra Body, I think I’m nearing the end of my own story.  I don’t expect it to end before the first draft of Extra Body is completed, and maybe not even before the story is published.  But I don’t think it will be much longer than that, and I don’t expect to do anything significant with HELIOS.  I’m too tired.  I’m too discouraged.  I have no hope for a future that’s any better than my present, and I certainly don’t think I deserve one.

I suppose there will be further bulletins as events warrant, but I doubt anyone will care.  It really doesn’t matter whether I live or die, and I’m not sure that even “regular” readers will notice when I stop doing this.  Oh, well.