Tuesday, 12 February 2002

Not a very productive day. Progress on my task at my day job is slow. I didn't make any headway on my story this evening.

I did have a good time at lunch today. I had lunch with Rumor Mill regular John Savage. He had read my article in the most recent Speculations ("Story Structure in Short Stories") and had a couple of interesting insights. I suggested that he should write an article for Speculations, but he didn't seem inclined to do so. He was comparing stories written for workshops to "two part inventions" (to borrow the musical term). That is, as exercises intended to demonstrate a technique.

I heard an interesting bit on the radio today about epidemiology. I may be able to use it in a story. My brain was trying to fit it into the non-lethal story, but I'm not sure it goes.

It's staying light later. The past two days I've had to head home from work promptly at 5:00, so I got to see that it was not only not pitchy black, but was actually light at that time of day. Soon it will still be light when I get home from work, which will be a real treat.

I slept poorly last night. I woke up around 4:15 when Jackie got up and then didn't fall back to sleep. I was still awake when she came to see if I wanted to get up at 5:30 so we could go lift weights. But I said no and then managed to get back to sleep and sleep until 7:00. So, I ended up getting enough sleep, although we missed out on weight lifting. I had strange dreams, too, with parades and screened windows and boys with firecrackers and running out of gas on the highway, and finding gas pumps that not only didn't take credit cards, they were actual antiques, the kinds rural gas stations sometimes still had in the late 1970s.