We had some friends over Sunday afternoon, and we all went out and bought ice-cream cones and sat around the fountain on Bridge Square and watched some junior high school boys laughing and throwing bicycles at each other. This went on for a long time.
I’m sitting by a window with my notebook. It’s raining. Most of the leaves outside the window haven’t yet changed color. For some reason, most of today’s rain fell out of quite a bright sky, so the whole day has been charged with a beautiful green glow I can’t recall ever seeing before. My story’s protagonist is on the moon at this point, wrapped in its (quite different, I imagine) glow, trying to prevent the killing of any more of the Man in the Moon’s dairy goats. She has just crossed over to the Dark Side, following the goat-killer’s tracks. And as far as the Dark Side goes, the sun here has finally yielded to the rain clouds, and the glow is gone. I want it back.
An unknown number of local teenagers likes to hide out in our yard and smoke dope. The smoke drifts in our windows, and eventually one of our daughters says, “What’s that smell?” Then I have to go out and stalk around sniffing the air and listening for giggling from the bushes. When I do this, I look EXACTLY like Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace, right down to the weird mustache.
I spent a chunk of the day reading about sword making and sago processing, for use in the Srivijaya section of the Derby Ram story. I now know the difference between cast iron and wrought iron, I can tell you how to produce several types of crucible steel, and I know how to make pempek. Mmm, pempek.
In the past couple of days, everyone I know (and a few total strangers) has slapped me upside the head, asking why I disappeared for weeks without warning. Here’s a partial excuse:
All our stuff, in the form of a bunch of Door-to-Door storage containers, showed up on July 1. It quickly became obvious that moving house and writing a first draft were not going to be compatible, so I dropped into full-time domestic responsibility for the month of July.
I don’t have a good excuse why I didn’t post an explanation earlier in the month. So, uh, sorry. Won’t happen again. Back to full-speed-ahead August 1.