author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Or as ready as they can look on the day the task is done. I should read them over again later, though, after I write up the synopsis. In any case, I got to the end of Chapter Three.

By the time he got back to Seattle (in the passenger seat of a green Saturn coupe whose driver held contradictory opinions about hitchhiking), a crimson sea was once more washing over the world. But this time it was the healthy, rose-touched red of sunset. It had nothing to do with lack of air. Brian was breathing just fine. Air moved into him comfortably and out again with each breath, just like air should. He was exhausted, true, but there was nothing wrong with him really, nothing at all.

He was alive and well. He wasn't on his way to Colorado.

And he never would be again.

Yay! Bittersweet sunsets and resignation and foreshadowing and whatnot, go me! Now all I have to do is write up a synopsis and something like a letter of intent. Here's what happens in the book, and here's why I want to attend the workshop.

I'm not entirely sure what happens in the book. I haven't entirely decided. I suppose I'd better just make the best guess I can and trust that it'll be good enough to get me in the door.

The exceedingly friendly lounge car steward on the train from Chicago to New Orleans asked me something relevant here. "Do you think you need it?" He meant the workshop. He meant, can writing be taught? Are workshops worth it? And yes, enough of the craft of writing is teachable that there's no question workshops can be worth it. But it remains a good question: Why do I want to go? What do I hope to learn? When I think about Big Name Authors (or even medium-name authors) reading my sorry attempts at telling this story and pointing out all the ways in which I've gotten it wrong, I cringe, I really do. But I still want to go. Why?

I really hope I have a better reason than the fan-girl one. "Ohmygawd like I totally want to meet Big Name Authors and have them read my Stuff *swoon* it'll be so rad!"

Maybe I'm hoping that the very knowledge that I've spent a lot of money to go, and put a lot of face on the line, will push me into high performance mode. I always have worked well under pressure. I hate it, but it works. Maybe that's why I procrastinate. Maybe I'm doomed to procrastinate all my life.

Victoria Nelson has some very kind things to say about procrastination. She says that we should stop punishing ourselves with the word and start looking at it as a statement of fact: I have put off my task until tomorrow. Why have I done this? What is preventing my unconscious creator mind from working with my conscious ego? What can my ego do to improve relations with my unconscious? Only I don't know how to answer that question. Creation happens in a state of grace, she says. You can't make it happen by force of will; you can only relax and allow the miracle to happen. And let yourself write as an act of play instead of a chore. Have fun.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of all this advice, but kind words and having fun seem like a good place to start. Better than hating myself for taking all day to get started, anyway.

In other news, I've been messing around a bit with the blog code. I'm quite pleased with having converted the blog entries table from being indexed by timestamp to being indexed by an auto_increment ID number instead, and revising all the display and entry management code to reflect that, all in under twelve hours. Unfortunately, you can't see that. What you can see is I've put the Random Writing-Related Quote back onto the page. Yay! Bask in its radiance! It is a thing of beauty!

(Yes, I know. I need to get out more. Hush.)

A huge black crow swept across the sky accompanied, half a mile below, by its shadow on the forest of apartment building roofs. For half a second the distance between the two birds grew and then shrank again as the crow's shadow passed over a clearing, a small square of soil between the buildings. The bird's wing blocked the sun and flickered in a woman's eye. She blinked and cast above her for the source of the irregularity, squinting against the sun's rays, but the crow had gone, well on its way towards whatever it is crows seek.

Nothing grew on this patch of soil. It had been years since the woman had tried. Now she simply sat there for half an hour out of this day or that, imagining herself a flower that tried to grow in the barren would-be garden. She saw herself a green shoot that sprang up from the half-buried seed, saw her questing tip put forth leaves and then a bud--but she couldn't get the bud to open into blossom. She could not see herself bloom.

Yes, but why?

Because it provides context. It provides a frame. If one writes bedtime stories last thing before sleep and then wakes to make more stories out of what dreams one remembers, these activities form a sort of contextual bracket around the day. It becomes a day in the life of a writer, and not merely a day in which one writes.

That's why.

And so, that settled, good-night.

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.

Data insufficient. General failure reading disk. (A)bort? (R)etry? (F)ail? (K)eep writing?

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."

...and what I wrote about it after I recorded it for posterity.

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.

I have no idea where the terminal illness angle came from. Stuff occurs. I follow it. Stories happen. Or at least babbledraft happens, and maybe it could become stories, someday.

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.

No one needs this. I mean, really. No one actually needs me starting on the sequel to The Drowning Boy at this point. But that's what my brain was doing last night as I tried to get me to sleep. And since the coach car of an Amtrak train isn't nearly as easy to get to sleep in at night after two cups of coffee and one of tea as it is in the late morning after being up since six, my brain had a lot of time to write Chapter One.

Well, and of course it's to do with Brian Windlow's children. Why else would there be a sequel?

But... and this is the part where I beat myself about the head and shoulders with a broomstick... but my brain also decided last night that Brian isn't dead.

The hell? I said. After the penultimate chapter in Drowning Boy, you tell me he's not dead? What is this, a bad gothic romance?

Well, says my brain, it's not like we saw the body. And yes, if you want to know, this is a gothic romance. After a fashion, anyway. Whether it's bad remains to be seen.

But... but... not dead? Sharks, man! There were all sharks in the water!

It's hard to imagine a brain smiling smugly and quietly to itself while twiddling its thumbs, but at this point, mine managed it.

So I woke up this morning and I wrote the first 1500 or so words, which begin this way:

Three weeks into the swim season, my son came home with news that just about stopped my heart.

When I could breathe again, I said, "They don't like it, huh?" and congratulated myself on keeping my cool.

"And it's not like I do it that much," he said, nodding. He was eight years old and already a super-serious kid. "The chlorine hurts my nose. But it makes them so mad when I do it. They say I'm cheating."

"Well, you are, honey." Was I calm? I was calm like a Valium bouquet. I was calm like a three-toed sloth. "I mean, when they say 'underwater contest,' they're competing to see who can hold their breath the longest. If you're not holding your breath, that's cheating, right?" See how calm I was.

I do know that, before very long, Amy's surprisingly amphibious son will get to meet his mermaid half-sister. That's been in my head since the point at which I realized that if Amy and Brian didn't get to "do it," not even once, then it wouldn't be fair to anyone. But I don't know much of anything else that's going to happen. I don't even know why I've given it the title I have, other than it being a likely folk tale to draw from. I don't think I want to follow it to the letter, though. That would be too sad. I don't want any proud young gunners shooting this kid.

So this'll go on the shelf until I figure that out. Meanwhile, I've got a couple of novels to revise. I mean, it's not like I don't have enough to do here. Look, two more hours on Drowning Boy still hasn't got me to the end of Chapter Two, and revising that phone call with Mrs. Windlow is going to be unmitigated hell. So what do I need with starting brand new novels at this time, huh? I ask you.

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."

Not exactly quotable dialogue, not exactly final draft material arising fully formed from the brow of Zeus, but useful. Informative. Brian's in denial. Well, duh. But. That makes everything make sense.

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.

One of the side benefits of fictioneering is the Fiction Bubble. The author immerses herself in her fictional world, seeing her characters' surroundings out of their eyes, building a wall of narrative around herself word by word. It can be a disadvantage, sure, if the Fiction Bubble makes it hard for the author to focus on Responsible Stuff, sure, but when the real world is full of Seriously Tragic Stuff Against Which One Feels Helpless, a good cushion of fiction between oneself and reality also serves as a cushion between oneself and the onset of clinical depression.

Addendum: This. And on that note, this too.

Cultivate dailiness, ye writers and storytellers, for the Truth may set ye free, but a good Lie can keep ye sane.

Nevertheless. I've begun a short story about rebuilding New Orleans. It's a ghost story, of course. The first few sentences go something like this:

They rebuilt New Orleans on top of its own bones in the year 2006. They caught the floating caskets and anchored them once more to their mausoleums. They planted a new Mardi Gras tree on Bonnabel Boulevard. They dried out Mandina's and put on a fresh pot of red beans and rice. And we all came home.

Only time and a finished first draft will tell whether it'll turn into something worth publishing or remain nothing more than an angry liberal New Orleanian's wish-fulfillment fantasy. Plotwise, that'll probably depend on whether the stuff I'm wishing for incurs a price within the story. Magic, miracles, and the helpful dead--they don't come for free.

Meanwhile, Drowning Boy is swimming along. I wish I were going faster with it, but at least Chapter 10 isn't slogging at the sloggy non-speed of Chapter 7. More action and discovery of new worlds; less maudlin wallowing. Because the rewrite has Brian changing land for sea at Lake Union instead of Alki Beach, I had to get him through the Ballard Locks. Research can be fun! Another side benefit of fictioneering: the author never lacks for excuses to learn a little bit about everything.

Not that I don't have a good excuse already, what with being a human being in an interesting--sometimes too-interesting--world. But it's amazing how far down a tangent "I can use this in a story" will go.

Chapter 9 is over, and with it Part 1 ("Above")....

"He's gone."

"What do you mean?"

But I was broken. I only knew two words.

"He's gone."

Tomorrow, I'll be working on Chapter 10 and Part 2 ("Below"). This will involve some revisions to the chapter outline, no doubt, and once more cracking open the 3-ring binder containing the manuscript's first draft, which I hadn't touched since hitting Chapter 5, the first chapter that had to be rewritten from scratch.

Yesterday turned into my day off for the week (I say that so smoothly, just as though taking a day off per week was part of the original plan) because of a friend visiting from out of town. More a friend of my husband's, part of his core gaming group, but, hey, I like him just as many bunches, and once in a long long while I'll play too.

Like last night. After the six of us went out to dinner at Acqua Pazza (which, sadly, seemed to be having an off-night; better luck next time), we headed over to the largest house of those at our disposal, broke out the soda, beer, and espresso, and made some characters for this crazy AD&D/White Wolf hybrid system that my husband and our out-of-town friend had gone and thunk up. The intent was to keep the Dungeons & Dragons setting but ditch its play complexity, replacing D20 and rigid class concepts with the D10 "dot" pool those of y'all familiar with Mage: The Ascension or Vampire: The Masquerade might recognize.

And just to make things even more absurd and chaotic, John tossed into the mix a deck of Story Cards he bought at Gen Con Indy. Each card contains a very simple phrase and description: "Insomnia." "Surprise summoning." "Mistaken identity." These are dealt to the players. With them come the power to briefly take over the role of Dungeon Master/Game Master/Storyteller; you play a card and say how its contents happen in the story. For instance, during the requisite tavern meet-up at the beginning of the story, my character finds herself inadvertantly recruited for bartending duty. I play "Mote in eye" and say, "Suddenly, the bartender gets something in his eye!" John, our GM, rolls with it. "The bartender goes into the back room, clutching his eye and saying something about a splinter." At this point my character urges the rest of the party to leave the bar, right now, before the bartender recovers and sets me bussing tables or something.

It all worked surprisingly well. Resolving conflict becomes very simple when you don't have to memorize different dice combinations for each possible form of weaponry; a Ranger type just rolls the amount of D10s corresponding to DEX plus her Bow skill, and there you go. And everyone was eager to play their cards--on NPCs, on themselves, on each other. There's a "Lust" card in that deck, did you know? Yeah. One of the other players thought it would be funny to play it, resulting in my character having an unpleasant close shave with an amorous purple shrub. Ew.

We didn't get home until something like 2:00 AM. Lots of fun. We should have friends fly in from Paris more often.

Tomorrow the crew's coming over here to play a 13th Level AD&D adventure; I think I might sit it out due to my inexperience with straight AD&D at any level, and also due to some serious clean-up needed in the guest bedroom. Before that, of course, I mean to crack open the manuscript of Drowning Boy and really try to wrap my head around the order of events in the next few chapters. Sharks, assumed-dead family members, and mermaids. That's what I get to deal with over the next few writing sessions. Wish me luck...

Almost didn't post this evening. It's been a long and busy day in which the only times available to work on Drowning Boy were this morning (had I woken up two hours earlier, which I didn't) and right now. And if the IHOP was too uncomfortably public for composing a sex scene, imagine trying to write Hot 'N Steamy from the cramped seat of a crowded westbound #B bus.

Work today involved not only database input, web page modifications, and attempts to script a self-updating potcast feed, but also a lot of driving and a 3,000-foot change of altitude. And then it was a mad scramble to catch the westbound #S. And on the bus I had a story to critique and homework to complete for my writing class. Not that I get graded. Homework in this class is completely optional. But so many good ideas are born from homework exercises that I hate not to do them.

So here I am on the bus with a headache (cf. altitude change) and very reluctant to start on the novel. I'm thinking, "4 hours, all right, I mean 6 hours tomorrow. No, eight! Just--not tonight, OK?"

But wait just a moment there. I did my homework. If that's not writing, what is?

Hence the new manuscript title at upper left. The Bookwyrm's Horde is a metafictonal novel--rather, a transfictional novel--concerning an author who inherits a magically labrynthine bookstore after which the novel is named and who writes stories that children just fall right into. Literally. Also, the Bookwrym? He's real. He's big and purple and wears horn-rimmed glasses and, occasionally, eats people.

Over the past few years I've babbled out bite-sized bits of that novel at random intervals. The word count you see up there sums up all those vignettes. And I've only just realized that this, this here, is the real first book of my "book detective " series (the one that I hope won't get flagged as a Jasper Fforde rip-off; I swear I've been working on it, mentally at least, since before I ever heard of The Well Of Lost Plots.) So this realization puts much of the next novel--which involves a missing main character--into perspective. It also upsets my previous ideas about how Bookwyrm was going to shape up. But that's why story-writing is so fun, right? You never know what'll happen next.

So, just to prove I wasn't a complete bum today--well, as regards writing; I have been very busy otherwise, and yesterday too, just not so much with writing--here's what resulted from my homework assignment. The prompt was this: Take the phrase "message in a bottle" and reinterpret it. No desert islands, no literal bottles. Here goes.

Every day that she could steal a few minutes, she went to the library. She went like a fugitive, on frightened feet, staring about with haunted eyes. She would wait at the juncture in the path until a moment when no one could see which direction she chose. And she'd hide her face from the librarian at the information desk.

But if you were to follow her, if you were, say, a small brown mouse with peppercorn eyes and quiet, quiet toes, you'd see her sneak over to the middle-grade shelves. You'd see her picking her terrified way past the voices of children some five years her junior, flashing that hunted look up and down each aisle before venturing into its narrow confines. You'd know when she got close to her target by the way she began to allow her eyes to rest on book titles.

It wouldn't take her long to choose. Five minutes at the outside, and she'd have a book down in her hands, flipping madly through it. If you didn't know better, you'd think she just wanted to reread her favorite scene. And you'd be confused by the fear in her hands.

And when she found just the right page, she'd reach quick-quick into her back jeans pocket, whip out a piece of paper, and in one motion slip it into the book and the book back onto the shelf.

Then she'd run.

And if you happened to have seen her do it, you might have gone back to that book and searched it for her contribution. You wouldn't find it any other way; she chose books that never got checked out much. But if you were, say, just a little sandy mouse with clever paws and claims to literacy, you might have seen which book she chose, and you might have been able to open it up to the right page, and you might have been able to read...

"Page 168-and-a-half: Then, while Alison was still practicing her BROODING face at the window, she saw a little girl come running down the street. The little girl looked so distressed that Alison opened the window wide and leaned out and said, 'Hi! What's wrong?' And the little girl said, 'Please help me, I'm stuck in the real world and I have to get out, can I be in your book please?' And Alison said, 'Of course you can be in my book.'"

If you knew where to look--but of course you wouldn't--you could find almost ninety-nine notes like this one in almost ninety-nine books, and they'd all show a little girl meeting one of the characters and asking for permission to enter the story.

But since you're not a mousey-brown mouse with well-traveled feet, you don't know a thing about it until one day the newspapers report a missing child and quote woeful parents with tears running down their cheeks, and you just shake your head over the tragedy of a world in which even little girls aren't safe from evil. And you go on to put your coffee mug in the sink and kiss the cats goodbye, and you lock the door and you head into the office for another day of depressing sales calls.

But there's a lot more to know than what you know, and the thing about this little girl is, she was the first.

See? I told you so. Writing. And mad propz to whoever spots the YA novel to which a page 168.5 was contributed. (Not that 168.5 is necessarily the right page number. I'm going from memory here.)

OK, we're now about 300 words into Chapter 7. Typed up about the same in a Notes file first, babbling away to myself about what was going to happen. I was still trying to figure out exactly what happens in this chapter, see. I knew how it would end, and I knew that it was Amy's turn to tell part of this story. But that was about it.

Then I hit the part of the Notes babble when I considered the question, "What has Brian been doing?"

He's been running.

Literally. In addition to running away, he's actually been running. To let off steam. Every time the violent instincts arise, he goes running until they subside. All he's doing is making himself too tired to act on his impulses... which, of course, better sets up the deadly outburst at the end of this chapter.

I figured he's also spending lots of time out of the house, most of it at the Suzallo-Allen Library (pre-law is a demanding degree, perfect for someone looking to drown himself in schoolwork), but some of it on the lake shore hoping to see his brother again and ask him what's happening. When he has to be home, he comes in by the back door by the laundry machines, and he locks himself in his room.

But it was the running that got the chapter started.

I saw him run past the house one morning, full speed uphill with no indication he'd ever stop. This was three weeks later, three weeks in which he'd never said a word. "I'm sorry. I love you." Those were the last things he'd said to me. Since then, nothing.

I'd write more, now that I know where I'm going, but oh my Gods am I tired. Bridget and John and I went to a Yoga class this afternoon. They said it was a beginner's class. I suppose in some people's minds, it might actually qualify as such. I suppose.

Well, OK, it actually says All Levels. I'm not exactly sure my level is included in that "all."