The 35th Precinct

The library book I'm reading smells of woodsmoke. It's piquant and comforting and makes me think of autumn and flannel and burning leaves. I wonder if the person who read it before me took it camping and read it beside the fire, belly stretched over a sleeping bag and greenbark stick jammed into the damp earth nearby, its sharpened end covered in grease from a hot dog or the sticky-sweet remains of a roasted marshmallow. Maybe he was a young boy, that former reader, worrying his cuticle with his sharp, rodentine teeth. his legs crossed behind him at the ankles and raised like a lazily-flapping denim pennant.

Or maybe she was a girl, that former reader, stretched, not beside a campfire, but before the fireplace. Maybe when the snow lay in deep drifts upon the ground and stole the artificial light of man from the world, she and her family hunkered in the cabin, reading and playing cards and heating cans of Dinty Moore beef stew in the fireplace. Maybe she read the words that I now read to the sound of her dog whuffing sleepily on the rug and her baby brother whining for their mother's warmth and her father muttering dark imprecations against the goddamned power company from his La-Z-Boy throne.

Whoever held it last, their fingers curled around the edges and gliding over the smooth plastic of the laminated cover, the smell transports me to my own childhood, and to the late summer when my house burned down and we lived with my grandfather for a few weeks while we sifted through the ashes. I read Dracula for the first time that year, curled on a mustard divan in his library. No cover on that book, just dusty, black cardboard and faded silver embossing. That book, too, carried the faint tang of woodsmoke beneath the yellow dust, and ever after, it has been a scent I associate with my grandfather, who loved me more than he could tell, and whom I loved to the depths of my furious, embittered, bewildered soul.

Thanks, former reader. I owe you one.

A storm front passed through last night, and now the skies promise to be clear and beautiful for the next week. I intend to make the most of the gorgeous weather by working on the Brandenburg Gate puzzle while the sun shines through the window and watching DVDs. I've also picked out my next book--All That Remains, the third Kay Scarpetta novel.

After this one, methinks I'm going to take a break from the crime novel genre and read in another literary milieu. T.H. White's The Once and Future King has been sitting on my shelf for years as have Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys and Alice Walker's The Color Purple. There are also a few doorstop tomes from Steven Erickson's Fall of the Malazan Empire series, as well as The Brothers Karamazov, Johnny Got His Gun, and Miracle at St. Anna. Not to mention the pair of zombie apocalypse novels I'm awaiting from Amazon. I love a good whodunit, but sometimes it's good to shift gears and cleanse the intellectual palate. Drink enough, and even the finest wine tastes like hangover.

I'm still plugging stolidly away on the Christoph-centric Sprache interstitial. Fictional!Schneider has proven far more loquacious than I had anticipated, and if I let him, he'd commandeer the story entirely, the sly devil.

Attitudes like this one make Rammfen an irritating, uncomfortable place to be. It's just so smug. So, you understand the band better than all the other misguided plebes, do you? Please, o, great one, enlighten my simple mind.

I wholeheartedly agree with this confession, however. That makes me happy, too. Very, very happy.

I'll produce more substantive posts eventually, but right now, I'm just happy to bob along on life's currents and learn how to breathe without my mother's hands coiled possessively around my soul. I haven't done much writing, but I've been reading voraciously since the beginning of October. I think I've logged 1300 pages in the past ten days, and I'm currently having a third go at Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I bought a ridiculous number of years ago but twice abandoned in the face of the detailed description of the wealthy London social milieu in 1808. I just couldn't find it within myself to care about endless dinner parties and drawing-room politicking. I still can't, quite frankly, but the book is more digestible when read in fifty-page increments, and while the subject matter is dreadfully dry and deathless at the moment, there looms the promise of magic, and sometimes the prose drifts into the lyrical and convivial. Mr. Norrell and his coterie of puppeteers hold no interest for me, but Mr. Honeywell is a sweet old soul, and Childermass is obviously not what he appears. And so, I will persist for the time being. Perhaps the third time will be the charm.

It damn well better be. I paid nearly twenty dollars for this doorstep cum ad hoc murder weapon.

After a bit of poking about on the Internet, it seems that while Linux works well on most desktops, it's a bit fussier on laptops. Bummer. I'd wanted a Linux laptop to help stave off the legions of viruses that lurk in cyberspace, but if there are going to be massive hardware compatibility issues, then mayhap it would be best to simply quarantine the laptop from the Internet altogether and just transfer fic written thereon to the desktop via flash drive. Dell supposedly offers Linux-based laptops, but I've heard horror stories about their product quality and poor customer service and am not keen on giving anyone my financial information over a demonstrably vulnerable Windows system. So, the search for safer computing continues.

After much ballyhooing by the local media about a fearsome winter storm that could kill us all and necessitate the stealing of food and hoarding of gas cause power outages and treacherous road conditions, it...snowed for ten minutes. The power flickered intermittently, but that was it. There was no deluge or monster snow drifts that sealed us inside and threatened us with starvation until we started having Donner party daydreams. I wound up watching TV all night and reading, while Roomie chatted with his gaggle of RPing buddies. That so many newscasters insist on making mountains out of meteorological molehills is ridiculous and irresponsible. When a true emergency presents itself, people are going to ignore it because they've been desensitized by so much gross exaggeration.

I'm reading Ramsey Campbell's The Overnight, a story that borrows liberally in concept from Stephen King's short story, "The Mist." Outside the Fenny Meadows bookstore, there are terrors in the mist. It's a creepy, unsettling yarn, to be sure, but the British syntax is driving me crazy. Campbell is far more reserved in his use of commas than his writerly brethren; maybe he finds it irksome to interrupt his train of thought long enough to tap the appropriate key, or perhaps the British have different rules concerning the proper deployment of commas. In any case, he omits commas between adjectives and dependent and independent clauses, and my American brain often blunders through the string of words in a state of panicky befuddlement as it tries to decide just where it should pause to connect the proper couplings. It's rather frustrating, and so I read no more than a chapter a night, lest my brain overheat.

Do other British writers do this as well, or is Ramsey Campbell simply too fattened by his years of well-deserved accolades to bother with commas any longer?

( Numbe3rs 513: Dead Girl--Minor SPOILERS )

I had planned on putting the finishing touches on "Glory Days" today, but the weather saw fit to piss on those plans. It rained intermittently from noon until eight o'clock, and ever since the painful lesson of 2004, when my electronics were wiped out by a single lightning bolt, I refuse to plug in my electronics until the skies have cleared. Hence, no ficcing. I'm going to do what I can after Numb3rs, but I doubt it will get me across the finish line. Bleagh. Please, just let Wednesday be clear so I can get Flacked good and proper.

I read a lot today, however, and thoroughly enjoyed the act, if not the book. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy has been lying around the apartment for years, ever since I had to read "The Locked Room" for an advanced Lit course with the Chair of the English Department. Auster is quite the wordsmith, and the ideas he puts forth in his writing-namely the nature and search for identity and the writer's function in creating it-are interesting and intellectually engaging, but I'm not a fan of pretentious self-awareness in books, and the trilogy is clotted with it. It's as off-putting as the ideas are fascinating, and casual readers and genre fans would do well to give it a miss. Fans of intellectual racquetball might be captivated by the Miltonian discourses on human nature and the frailties of social constructs. I enjoyed them despite their obvious funk of authorial showboating.

As soon as I finish Trilogy, I've got Gregory Maguire's The Ugly Stepsister lined up, as well as Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I started a year ago and abandoned when I wearied of the endless descriptions of drawing-room politics in Edwardian and Victorian England. Then, there's John Steinbeck's East of Eden. Heaven knows if I'll get to them all, but I should try. Reading is a writer's best and simplest defense against the erosion of skill.

And then there's the writing I hope to do, weather permitting. I've still got all the prompts from Fic Gueraerobics 2006, the impending assignment from Lyricathon 2006, and the sundry plotkits that scuttle from their burrows to nest and nibble on my toes. For instance, I'm noodling with the idea of Flack walking away from Rebecca after finding out that she's a witch, only to discover after a few weeks that misses her and wants her back, witch or not, but cannot find a way to return to the wizarding world to tell her so.

Well, it's time to drink root beer and watch Numb3rs.

ETA: Feliz Cinco de Mayo a todos que lo celebraron.