author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Bares Her Life Secret To Members Of Dr. John Fletcher's Psychology Class. Says She Has Communicated With Spirits Of Other World Since She Was Five Years Old. Relates Her Shades Of Roosevelt, Gen. Grant, Mark Twain, Robert Ingersoll and Others Visited Her. Declares T. R. Urged Her To Inform World Of Her Experiences. She Was Once Governess To A Prince, She Says.

The New Orleans Item-Tribune was a merging of the Morning Tribune and the Item, which I understand to have happened after my target date of January 19, 1930; but January 19 was a Sunday, and perhaps Sundays were different. In any case, once I had the JAN 1930 microfilm in the machine, I found that the heading on each page was indeed The Item-Tribune. I read, or skimmed, the January 19 edition from cover to cover.

It is very hard not to get distracted, browsing old newspapers of your home town. Everything is fascinating. Everything is recognizable. But the language of each story is almost fairy-tale alien, and I'm not just talking about the inevitable racist and xenophobic attitudes hard-wired into crime reports and population statistics. The details chosen to add color to a story, the adverbs and adjectives sprinkled over the top, the very choice of story material, these all reveal a very different world. I want to learn all about that world, because it gave birth by slow progressions to my world. I want to take the entire newspaper home with me and love it and hug it and give it cookies.

In any case, I thought I'd found something on the very first page, where a tenant's sudden death by, it is assumed, poison, is reported. The landlady heard him screaming in his room and called the ambulance. But the mention of this date in Gumbo Ya-Ya was supposed to be not another death, but "an account of this amazing instance of spectral assistance in making a financial success of a boarding house." So. Keep looking.

I think I struck gold on almost the last page of the January 19 edition, which was devoted in the main to the story whose headline I've titled this blog entry with. The woman in the story is "a 69-year-old French woman, who has lived in New Orleans for the past 10 years," and lives at 1429 St. Charles Avenue. Her name is Madame Marie Teresa Guizonnier. She "feels she is ready to tell about ... a strange double existence that she has kept secret for seven decades."

"Theodore Roosevelt has come and spoken to me. He has appeared in my room as I sat at my sewing; he has looked over my shoulder at the newspaper clippings and read them with me. He has told me things about the universe beyond that I think will startle the world," she says.

"Houdini has stepped down to tell me of the unhappy time he is having adjusting himself in the spirit government. General Grant, always on his horse, has come riding from the clouds to encourage me in my messages with the spirits...."

"Suddenly I saw little girls sitting around me and holding dolls in their arms.

I spoke to them and they answered. Soon I was able to carry on connected conversations with them, and I began to welcome the 'punishment' of being sent into the dark room. Later I could see the same children walking about the halls--even in daylight, and I talked with them too.

Mark Twain appears to her from time to time in a bed in which he continues to write, she says. He lies on his side and as he talks of his spiritual existence, he makes notes on paper placed on a little table beside his resting place.

She moved to New Orleans in 1919 following the death of her husband, and was compelled to stay by her ghostly visitors.

"I did not intend to stay here when I first arrived. I have no further interest in the city. But whenever I attempt to leave, I find they will not let me. They demand that I continue to communicate with them."

Hey, at least now my character has a name!

Now we'll see whether anyone reads my blog I don't know about. Because I'm rather guilty of telling nobody in the area--including, with one exception, family--that my next stop after Chicago would be New Orleans.

Yes. Sneaky stealth French Quarter stay. John and I had a week with Interval International to use up, and John was out of vacation days, so it was up to me. I plugged a likely looking week into The Quarter House and called it an extended writing retreat. (It just happened to line up well with the annual Chicago crawfish outing.) Also a preview homecoming, given that I'm hell-bent on moving back to New Orleans someday, at least part-time. I mean, it's home, dangit. I ought to spend more time actually living there.

So why haven't I told anyone about it? Because... well, a week and a half can go by really quick if it fills up with visiting obligations and other unforeseen restrictions. And I just want this week and a half to myself, right? I'm allowed, right? Right?

So. If I get a phone call tomorrow afternoon with disappointed family members scolding me for this (or even saying "hey, it's all right, enjoy your vacation, just promise to visit next time"), that will be an interesting and possibly scary way to find out that Mom and Dad (or friends of theirs, or other family members) are reading my blog. If they are, I must beg them not to get mad at my brother, who mixed me this lovely, lovely Bloody Mary I am drinking. I swore him to secrecy on pain of pain. Blame me, not him! I'm the older one, right? I'm a bad influence, clearly!

OK, well, you can blame him for any typos. He mixes a non-trivially strong Bloody Mary. Vodka makes me insanely uncoordinated as far as fine motor control goes. I'm fixing the fat-finger fuxxups as I go, but I may miss a few.

Don't worry, gross motor control should remain trouble-free. This is important. I'm on my bike. Woo, Riverbend to French Quarter. Woo, past midnight.

This update is not turning out to be so quick. On with it.

1) Got here. Pleasant train ride. Interesting scenery, among which I will count the guy who was shouting at everyone who would listen that "They Blew The [17th Street Canal] Levee!!!" because "They" wanted to shut down the Lower Ninth Ward and needed a Cat. 5 Hurricane for cover. I think this particular theory has been around since before Camille, actually. Most of the times I hear it, it's attached to, I dunno, a canal with less proximity to multi-million-dollar neighborhoods like Lakeview. But whatever. He says he heard a BOOM, and Gods know there's nothing but dynamite can cause a boom, right? Like I said - interesting scenery on my train.

1)b. No free wi-fi in the W, and I refuse to pay when any number of fine establishments like Z'otz and Bruno's will give me what I want. Also the Royal Cafe, if I'm not feeling all that "woo" about biking to the Riverbend and I'd rather just walk about 4 blocks instead.

2) Nibbled at the short story WIP. Really, only nibbled. And not until I got into town and was having dinner at this little Vietnamese place two doors down from Camillia Grill. My nibbling gave me an ending, and it gave me an unforeseen backstory complication. I'm so proud of my little 650-word story! It's developing a back-story!

3) Will probably do more nibbling tomorrow, as well as a visit to the Williams Research Center for microfiche reading to buttress the verisimilitude of "A Surfeit of Turnips" (which will probably get a new title before it goes out again). Hey, when Gumbo Ya-Ya tantalizingly mentions a 1930 story in the New Orleans Item Tribune referencing the most bizarre ghost story I have ever heard, who am I to resist?

4) Will probably have lunch here (via both Neilhimself and docbrite).

And that's it for now. Laters!

Since writing yesterday's blog entry, I took a closer look at the write-up that came with the "2008 Beignet Waiter" collectible figurine that came with this year's King Cake. Apparently my little trip down memory lane was quite appropriate: Haydel's was, in fact, thinking of The Morning Call and not the Cafe Du Monde. (Here's Haydel's King Cake Collector Dolls web page. At the time of this writing, it hasn't quite caught up with the times. They're still showing the 2004 doll, which was a porcelain Pete Fountain. He's so cute!)

This tells me two things. First, that Metairie is not officially excluded from Mardi Gras history and nostalgia. That's a relief. I'm used to being a little defensive about my status as a Jefferson Parish native. (Welllll, I may yet have to be defensive. Calling it "Metairie's version of the Cafe Du Monde" is kinda wrong: its original location was on Decatur Street. It only moved to Metairie in 1974. That's pretty darn recent in terms of the establishment's 138-year history, but from my perspective, that's still before I was born. Plus the little slideshow on its web site's front page includes shots of the Metairie location's interior. So nyah.)

Second, since the write-up was in present tense, I'm gonna assume that The Morning Call is not as doomed as my last visit to the place made it seem. And hoo boy is that a relief.

Anyway. So much for that.

For today's thing, I'm reduced to writing prompts. That's right; I can't think of anything to write. So I went over to Writer's Digest's Daily Prompt site... and was immediately disgusted. I know, I know, I shouldn't be picky, the whole point of a prompt is to write stuff I wouldn't otherwise have written, but... I'm sorry, I can't bring myself to do it.

So instead, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do a search on Google, open up the first page of links (excluding paid advertisement) in tabs) and choose... let's say the 10th noun appearing on that page. That would be the main block of text, not the sidebar menu or whatnot.

Sounds like an appropriately anal retentive procedure. Only one problem:

What's my search phrase?

...I'll get back to you on that.

Happy Mardi Gras! We had friends over to help us eat up red beans & rice, andouille sausage, cornbread, and ... oh, I'd say about half the King Cake that Mom sent. (John got the baby.)

Mom always sends me at least one King Cake from Haydel's bakery every Mardi Gras. Not only is this because I'm a homesick New Orleanian and she knows it, but also because Haydel's in particular puts a little collectable porcelain figurine in the package. This year's figurine is a "Beignet Waiter." You can tell because of the paper hat.

MORNING CALLS

Here: Praise for the man in the paper cap
and the matched streams of milk and coffee:
hot, hot, piping hot
and swirling before my spoon
even touches it.

Here: An ode to the hour, that the night has a case of
the two-aye-ems
and I've no place else to go:
just here, amongst the mirrors,
amongst the cups of coffee
swirling with milk.

The world hasn't woken up yet
I haven't woken up yet
I'm dreaming these mirrors, the mirrors are dreams,
I'm dreaming this cup of coffee,
the milk, your paper hat.

I must have been sleepwalking
I'm awake now

Anyway. I want my Morning Call back. Dammit.

I'll check again in April when John and I come visit for the French Quarter Fest.

I updated my NaNoWriMo profile recently. The bit where it says, "Favorite writing music," it always used to say "Blue Man Group: Audio" there, because I usually prefer writing to instrumentals. I've even got my computer set to start playing the album at 6:00 AM in the hopes that I will, upon hearing "TV Song," wake up and write. Generally this doesn't work. Generally I just hit the MUTE button on the outside of the computer and go back to sleep.

A couple of years ago I update that field to say, in addition, "FlashBackRadio.com." All '80s, nothing but the '80s, live DJ love for the '80s with listener requests and dedications. I recommend it. When I'm anywhere with internet and I'm not having a craving for anything in particular, that's what I put on. And then I request Rush's "YYZ," and I type "Greetings and departures" where the request form prompts for a new message subject line.

That has changed this year. This year sometime I was listening to a-ha's East of the Sun, West of the Moon, and thinking for the hundredth time that I really ought to get ahold of the actual "one-hit-wonder" album that everyone thinks of when they think of a-ha. The one with "Take On Me" on it. That would be Hunting High And Low. For some reason I finally acted on that thought this November.

And the two albums have been on infinite repeat pretty much since.

That will probably change soon, because I'm starting to get that weird dissatisfied feeling, a sort of almost physical ennui, where I'm still singing along and getting the songs stuck in my head, but it's not as fun anymore. It's not like I get sick of 'em. It's more like getting a surfeit of 'em. Like the way you start munching in response to a sweets or snacks craving and then after a while you realize you're still eating the yummy stuff mechanically but not really enjoying the experience. My sing-along voice is getting a little tired. It's getting bored of the melodies and even the usual harmonies. Some really improbable counterpoints are starting to come out.

There's an unusual amount of storm imagery on these two albums. It's rather striking when strung together into one big playlist. HH&L ends in a song called "Here I Stand And Face The Rain." After that, the first song on ES/WM is "Crying in the Rain." It has some nice rumbly weather sound-effects over the entrance of the main melodic line. The same sound effects accompany the penultimate song on the album, "Rolling Thunder," bringing the album full-circle so effectively that the last song feels like an epilogue.

And, y'know, all that storm imagery is sorta appropriate, isn't it, given the title and topic of the novel I'm working on.

No, I didn't just make that connection. But I was still embarrassingly late making it. Maybe I figured this out by Day 7, I dunno. In any case, I'm probably going to stick with this playlist throughout November, even if I do sometimes feel like the taste has cloyed.

There may be more connections to make, or inspiration to take, from some of these songs' cryptic lyrics.

If you happen to live at 4335 Lake Villa Drive in Metairie, Louisiana, I promise this isn't personal. The fictional kids in my fictional story just happen to live on your nonfictional block, that's all. I just popped addresses into Google Maps until I got sort of the house I was envisioning, et voila.

I didn't want to set the story on the street where I grew up. That seemed too easy. Plus I've done it before. So I hit on using the piece of Lake Pontchartrain I'm next most familiar with: the area by the Suburban Canal. I rode my bike down there countless times as a teenager, sometimes hanging out under the gazebo with my writing notebook and my headphones, sometimes just tossing french fries to the seagulls. I guess I could have had my two fictional kids hanging out on the sea wall by the Bonnabel Boat Launch, but it's too late now. I've worked on the story long enough that, dammit, they live where they live, and trying to pretend otherwise would be dishonest.

Sometimes pieces of a story get ossified like that; they're no longer up for debate because that's the way it happened. What began as fiction sort of calcifies into, if not exactly reality, than an idea that my thought processes treat as reality. Katrina happened in '05, the New Orleans Saints won their Divisional Championship in '06, and Louise and Jimbo live on the first block of Lake Villa south of West Esplanade. I know one of those things isn't true, but my thoughts make room for it just as though it were no less factual than the other two.

Anyway... If you happen to live in the area, dear reader, I wouldn't mind knowing how your neighborhood fared. The story is set during November/December '05, and I want to be at least semi-faithful to what really happened. Was it like my parents' block, where all the damage came from holes in roofs, not flood? Was the street pretty empty during the months following, or did people come home fairly quickly? I didn't see too much full-body devastation last time I took a bike ride up Lake Villa from the pumping station to Veterans Memorial Boulevard, but then that was December '06 and all sorts of restoration could have happened since. And when did all that construction at the pumping station start? It's not the safe-house I'm talking about; that's done. It's all the cranes digging up huge chunks of levee that I mean. And when was that sea wall built in front of the mouth of the canal? I know it wasn't there when I was in high school some 15 years ago. How do you even begin Googling for that kind of information? Think the Jefferson Parish Library can help? They can certainly tell me about branch closures and reopenings after the storm, at least. Maybe I should check the NOLA.com message boards, or ask around the comment sections at Metroblogging New Orleans.

If you have info and feel like sharing, the email link is at the bottom right-hand corner of the page. Yes, it's a pop-up web form. I'm sorry. Deal with it.

I really really meant to come home from work today and get 2,000 words closer to THE END of The Bookwyrm's Hoard. Only I got tackled by a new story on my way home. While I was biking. I didn't know the Muse could run that fast.

The logical progression went something like this: I was reading Making Light, like I do. Specifically this thread about odd new so-called security measures at the US/Canada border. The bit about gunboats on the Great Lakes turned this-a-way. Which made me think about these time-sensitive submission guidelines.

Oh, go on. Follow the links. Let them open in new windows/tabs. It won't kill you.

Anyway, what do I know from pirates? Or the Great Lakes? But, y'know, I do know a fair bit about life on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. And while real-life piracy is a subject opaque to me, there are some famous specimens of the fantasy realms to be explored.

And by the time I got home I had a rough idea of the beginning and the end, along with which harmless bits of my childhood should be wedged in at which strategic points in the plot. Such as the building and subsequent demise of the neighborhood fishing pier, the question of where the cars on the Causeway go after they cross the horizon, and the miracle of actually catching an edible fish off the back of the Bonnabel Pumping Station.

Several hours later, I've got the edges slotted into place. Next: a handful of identical-looking blue sky pieces and identical-looking green-tree pieces that need to be placed experimentally side by side by side.

More tomorrow, no doubt. The nice thing about this particular subject is, it has a deadline. This time I mean to hit it.

All fictional activity between last blog post and this one consists entirely of freewriting stints that may or may not become full stories. Nothing worth titling and entering into the manuscript database at this time. Some of the resulting chunks of babble form a sort of cohesive narrative, but whether it's the acorn of a novel or just me expanding on an abstract theme is not yet clear.

Outside, the city was on fire. This was not the first time, and many citizens continued throughout their day the way you would were your neigborhood undergoing construction. They picked their way around the embers, noted that downtown was not a good place to drive today, and, in ways both small and large, got on with their lives. The city burned and its citizens counted it an inconvenience.

...It was not a city of attached people. Like Zen monks, they took the loss of family heirlooms, homes, and inheritances in stride. It was going to pass someday. Today is merely sooner than not. But unlike Zen monks, they had attachments to other things: getting to work on time, doing what they wanted to be doing. They were philosophical about losing their homes but downright pissed off about getting off schedule.

You wouldn't want to visit.

...There used to be flowers out in front of my house. There used to be a house. It had a red roof, I think, that terra-cotta red they do with shingles and clay corners. But I don't recall the color of the door or even the shape of the door handle. In any case, it's gone now. The fire took it. And what scares me is, I never mourned. My first thought was, "I hope my car's OK. I need to go to Greenwood tomorrow night." And why did I have to go? To buy paint. To paint the living room walls.

The living room walls that are no longer there.

I've been avoiding getting back to work on Drowning Boy. I admit it. I am suffering from, or inflicting upon myself, that classic writer's malaise of being unable to bring myself to start. It's what makes most of my deadlined projects an unmitigated hell during the last few days of the timeline, and what makes so many of my short stories unfinished. I suspect it's a habit I'll have all my life.

In the meantime, in absence of a cure, the only effective workaround seems for me to be to sidle up on a project, catch it unawares. Open up the document and read through it and let myself naturally start editing the bits that need it, maybe. Open up a blank WordPerfect page and start typing, telling myself it doesn't matter. Lie back with the laptop on my knees and type myself a bedtime story.

Did you ever do that? Make yourself up bedtime stories and tell them to yourself at night? It used to take me forever to go to sleep when I was, oh, maybe eight or nine. Took me until darn near the teenage years to outgrow a kid's basic fear of the dark and the slight creaking sounds of a house at night. By the time I was in fifth grade or so, I'd finally gotten to where I didn't need one of my Neil Diamond tapes (usually Longfellow Seranade and Tap Root Manuscript) to drown out the silence, but it still took me an awful long time to get my senses to shut down and drop me off into unconsciousness. So I made up stories to pass the time. Sometimes I'd even whisper them out loud--whispering can tire you out real quick. Usually I just thought them. Pictured them. Tried to dream them. They were almost always a pre-teen's Mary Sue adventures in which she and either her schoolyard crush or her pop-star idols team up to save the world from evil.

(Hey, I grew up watching Scooby Doo. Remember all those celebrity cameos? Of course it seemed reasonable to imagine myself, too, solving mysteries and fighting crime alongside my favorite musicians and actors.)

Anyway. Technology having progressed to the point of internet-enabled word processors small enough to take to bed with you, the bedtime story habit isn't a bad one to revisit. And a surprising number of those mental Mary Sues have redeemable elements, if I can bring myself to remember them.

But tonight's tale, or worldbuilding exercise, or whatever, has nothing to do with those embarrassing old wish-fulfillment fantasies. It's more of a theme that came out of a dream I had some three years ago...

A man shows up after John and I wake up, and he says, "Did you hear about the fires in the night?" I say, "I thought I smelled a fire yesterday morning when I woke so early."

He came into my room quietly, his bedside manner spotless. I was just waking up, moving slowly out of the realms of unconsciousness and into the fields he knew. He let me gather the shreds of myself into a more-or-less coherent handful before gently placing a bomb in my lap. This kind of bomb: "There were fires in the night. You heard?"

Of course I haven't heard, I wanted to say. I've been asleep, you idiot. But I don't say things like that, or so I'm told. All I really said was, "No."

"They were contained quickly, but they did a lot of damage even so." He glanced up at me, as though reading in my face how much more it was safe to tell. Then he returned to studying his hand. I pulled my hand out from under his. "Where?"

He began drumming his fingers, very slowly. First he lifted his index finger and put it down again. Then his middle finger. Then I got impatient. "Where--"

"Several places. Pretty much simultaneously. One - out in the open space. The yucca's still smoking. One in the south, took a few farms. One - one in the northwest of town." He stopped, left his fingers still on the bedsheets. Took a deep breath as though expecting a blow. "In your neighborhood."

"Oh." I found myself mourning more the blue heron nests than my house and what it held. You can't take it with you, they say. How convenient to have it burned up so you can't regret not being able to take it with you. "Oh," I said again, not sure what else to say. Oh good?

"I checked. You insurance policy is good, up to date, they'll pay you--"

"It's all right," I said. "What would I do with the money, anyway?" I guestured at the hospital room surrounding us, with its beeping machines and its dripping IV towers. "I suspected I wouldn't be going home again, this time."

He looked horrified. "Don't talk like that," he pleaded, but I already wasn't really hearing him.

And blog posts happen, freakin' long blog posts, posts chronicling very little useful writing in the previous day and acting like a smoke screen obscuring the shame of another day full of procrastination.

And other things. Lots of weird things today. Things I don't plan to go into here because they are either (a) boring, or (b) personal. Today was full of 'em.

But mostly it was full of procrastination.

So, life quite suddenly sucks. My computer has died.

Well, that's putting it a little overly strong. Life doesn't exactly suck, per se. I mean, John and I are in Bloomington, Indiana; we're staying with Cate; we're comfy and well-fed and in loving company. True, the Saints did not win last night, but you can't expect too much from your weekend. Life is actually pretty good.

But somewhere between hibernating my laptop yesterday morning and attempting to wake it back up again yesterday afternoon, Something Went Horribly Wrong. After I halted its unsuccesful Resume From Hibernate prrocess, it entered a cycle of disk checks during which it deleted many purportedly corrupted sectors, and then after gnawing on itself in this fashion for several minutes it utterly failed to recognize a bootable drive. I get the Averatec splash screen and then nothing but a blinking cursor.

Curses!

So today I pulled out my spiral notebook, wrote down the previous novel-editing session's final sentence from memory, and then tried mightly to keep going. Boy, what a comedown. I've used computers for so long that my handwriting is illegible, and my longhand writing mentality is all, like, "This is just freewriting and Morning Pages and stuff, why should I care about quality?"

Clearly I need to compose manuscript copy in longhand more often. It's no good to rely so completely on electricity and microprocessors.

So today I mostly spent trying to convince myself to write as though it mattered. Then I got a little into Sasha's seemingly unplanned meeting with her classmate crush in the Wilcox Plaza bookstore. And when I get back to Boulder I need to dig up my Windows XP Home Edition install disk, which I am assured exists and ought to be in my possession. I am skeptical of this, having no memory of bringing one home at the time of my laptop's purchase....

As for other things: In my opinion, The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe was very, very, very, very good. Faithful fans of the Narnia books, whether their interest is in the fantasy story or in the Christian allegory, all ought to be well pleased. I am, however, a little troubled by an acquaintance's concern over the "appropriateness" of Lucy's friendship with the faun Tumnus. "I mean, he's, like, ten years older than her and he goes around shirtless! Is it right that they're going around holding hands all the time?" Is this an issue that ought even to occur? For heaven's sake, it's like watching Finding Neverland and begin convinced, despite James Barrie's protestations otherwise (which, by the way, the audience is supposed to believe), that the adult author is sexually involved with his children playmates. My goodness, we live in a corrupt age.

Other than that--other than having my mind now forever tainted by the previously unheard-of concept of little Lucy being preyed on by her best friend in Narnia--I have no complaints. Well, I was unimpressed by Liam Neeson's voicing of Aslan. But maybe that's unfair. Probably for me to be satisfied you'd have to get freakin' God in on that role. Well, God or James Earl Jones. Either one will do.

And in yet other news, the NaNoWriMo article in dirt has come out. Whee! Go read it right now!

Well, periodontist, actually. But it was at my dentist's office.

Yes yes yes long time no blog what a slacker what a bum talk about procrastination. Indeed. House painting, house cleaning, community knitting, Cessna flying, guest preparations, Saints watching, and all that jazz. Excuses, excuses.

Back to the dentist's. By the way, you would think that one could get some writing done while lying abed in post-op mode. You would think, wouldn't you? Uh-huh. Anyway, Friday my mouth got hacked into, in the service of keeping my teeth for my old age. Apparently it's a bad thing for tooth longevity when there's no thick, pink "attached tissue" in front of your tooth, but only the thin, darker, capillery-filled "movable tissue." And they have ways of making your mouth conform. It involves lots of local anasthetic, scapels, and stitches, and no eating of chewy things for days and days after.

This makes road trip novels like Neil Gaiman's American Gods a bad choice of post-op reading material. I mean, the characters keep stopping for hamburgers. Oh my sweet everloving Deities I want a hamburger.

Anyway, sitting in the dentist's chair and trying to ignore the sharp things. The periodontist says, "You can totally just close your eyes and go elsewhere, you know. I won't be offended. No. Seriously. Go paint your house or something." So I closed my eyes and tried once more to listen in on my characters' conversation again. I don't know what's been taking me so long about that--I guess not enough long, sustained time staring in panic at my computer. So apparently oral surgery is good for invoking the same sort of panic, I guess.

Brian: "Oh my God, Mike! You're alive!"

Mike: "Well, yeah. But you knew that."

Brian: "But that was a dream... wasn't it?"

Brian: [chuckles] "Little bro, you always were in denial."

That plus a few tips from Mike on how he actually would act in this scene, and I think we're rolling again.

(After that, the hovering-over-the-Puget-Sound visualization sort of morphed into standing on the red pedestrian bridge at the mouth of the 17th Street Canal and watching the pelicans preen themselves, and I got a little teary. Which is not wise when someone is sticking sharp things in your mouth. And now I have to add "Nostalgia" to the growing list of categories invoked by this entry. These entries really need to get a bit more focused.)

Meanwhile, Cate's coming to visit tomorrow. Excitement! More house cleaning! A trip to the airport! A trip to the other airport! Goths Having Tea! And early morning writing sessions while everyone else is still sleeping, if dailiness is to be cultivated. W00t!

More later, possibly with pictures.